[PHOTO] Stairwell peonies

[LINK] "How to Tell if Your City is Dying"

Charlie Jane Anders' io9 essay

Detroit just took another huge step towards the abyss, with its proposal to turn off street lights across half the city. This is the nightmare scenario for anybody who loves a particular city: that one day, it'll fail. Chances are, if you live in (or near) a city, you already worry over every little sign that your town is getting less cool, less vibrant, or just crappier.

But how can you tell if you're city is actually in a death spiral, or in danger of going into one? We asked around, and collected half a dozen key signs of urban death to watch out for.

Cities grow, or they die. We've all seen the spectre of urban centers hollowing out from the inside. And "ruin porn" has become a whole category of photography, with a huge fanbase. There have been multiple books of photos of Detroit's dilapidated theaters, railway stations and other formerly grand buildings. There's just something insanely compelling about looking into a formerly vibrant city gone dead — and part of it is the fear that this could happen to your town, as well.

Shrinking populations, declining average income and rising average age of resident populations, homeowners having problems financing repair, and a lack of demand not only for buildings but--critically--empty land are all signs.

The actual death of a city is much more unlikely than you might think — even though cities can decline and fall apart, that doesn't necessarily mean they're dead. Says Robert A. Beauregard, Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University, "Try not to think that the city is like a human being who is born, lives, and dies. Cities are socio-technical systems, precariously integral, and capable of becoming smaller and fragmented and still functioning well." When cities do disappear outright, they're usually smaller and more temporary, like the Gold Rush towns in California in the 19th Century.

And cities do come back — in the early 1990s, Los Angeles was going to Hell, even before the L.A. riots. San Francisco's population dropped steadily, losing about 150,000 people until about thirty years ago. And then SF started gaining population again — and now SF's population is the biggest it's ever been, says Ryan. Meanwhile, Chicago started gaining population again after a long period of loss, "and now it's started losing them again. Maybe Chicago's actually dying, and we can't tell."

Ryan says he first got interested in this topic when he visited Detroit in 1993. His friend, a local reporter, told him to check out the local train station before he left town. "Basically, the train station was like a Grand Central Station in New York, except it was abandoned and open. And it basically remains abandoned to this day," says Ryan. "All of a sudden, we were in this 'neutron bomb' sort of atmosphere, where you walk down the streets and nobody's there. We went in the doors and all of a sudden it was like we were in the Baths of Caracalla, except it was after the apocalypse. It was like Rome in 419 A.D."

[. . .]

When Ryan started writing about these topics a decade ago, everybody kept insisting that Detroit and other cities were mounting a comeback — but it was obvious if you looked at the facts, that it wasn't true. If you look back at newspapers, every year since 1960 there's been at least one article saying that Detroit is finally on an upswing. The crash of 2007 and the ensuing economic disasters have highlighted the already-existing troubles of America's cities, and that's when things like "ruin porn" have become so popular. "It's very visceral," says Ryan. "It really gets you."

And actually, ruin porn is deceptive — in a lot of neighborhoods of dying cities, the wilderness has already reclaimed the city, because the wooden houses have collapsed completely and greenery has taken over. It's actually green and tranquil, not gothic and horrifying — and in Detroit, there are beavers now. "These are cities that were built fast and cheap and built by speculators, to make quick money," says Ryan. "It turns out the whole fabric of the American city is quite ephemeral."

[BRIEF NOTE] On the last of the Ingrians

Helsingin Sanomat's Heli Saavalainen has an English-language article examining the elderly Ingrian populations of Kingisepp, a community in Russia just outside of St. Petersburg and not very far at all from the Estonian border.

The Ingrians are a Finnic population living in the hinterland of St. Petersburg, descended equally from indigenous and immigrant Finns, who suffered atrociously in the course of the 20th century. After the end of the Soviet Union, Ingrian Finns--then living mainly in Russia or in adjacent, Finnic Estonia--were offered Finnish citizenship, and very many accepted. Today, notwithstanding interest from Finland and Estonia in promoting Finnic languages and cultures among Russia's different Finnic populations--I blogged about this in January 2006 and July 2007--Ingrian ethnic identity seems on the verge of vanishing, as the old remain in their historic communities while the young emigrate to Finland (or Estonia) or assimilate into the Russian community.

The river flows swiftly through the town of Jaama, or Kingisepp in Northwest Russia. Young people spend their summer day on the shore, drinking beer and enjoying each other’s company. Here and there anglers try to catch fish.

The river is the Luga River. The area has strongly Finnish roots. At the Nivo cemetery on the Kurkola Peninsula there are plenty of Finnish names - Koi¬vu¬nen, Sep¬pä¬nen, Jalonen, Sippo, Harakka, Saunanen, Suomalainen.

The Ingrian culture is alive in the villages where a group of tenacious grandmothers who have gone through many tribulations in their lives still hang on.

One of the women is 83-year-old Tyyne Yllö. She was born in Hakaja, raised three children, buried her husband, mother-in-law, and her son and his family.

In 1943 at the age of 13 the girl was brought to Finland to escape the war. “The Germans drove us to Finland. They did it by force, although they said later that we wanted to go there ourselves”, Yllä says.

She ended up in a farm in Orimattila.

“Then in 1944 they said that we can go home.”

But there was no going back home – the new address was found in Siberia. “We had no food or money”, Yllö says, recalling her youth.

Her family fled to Estonia, and from there to Soviet Karelia. “There was work and bread there. They let us live.”

In 1958 they got permission to return to Hakaja. “I immediately had a great need to get back.”

However, their home was no longer the same. “Everything had been ravaged. There was no roof and no doors. Fish helped us through the poverty, and we had to work hard.”

[. . .]

The villages are also gradually dying out. “A few years ago all villages had life, even children”, says Father Grigori, a priest of the Ingrian Church.

The young people move out to find work, and the area becomes increasingly dominated by ethnic Russians.

“Many have moved to Finland, and many more are dead”, says Aleksander Ruotsi, the chairman of the local chapter of the Ingrian League.

When the association was set up in 1989 there were more than 2,000 active members. Now there are less than 100.

The congregation holds a memorial service at the Nivo cemetery each year. “Many times we take flowers to those who were there the previous year”, Father Grigori says.

[LINK] Two GNXP links on hidden ancestries

GNXP's Razib Khan posted two links to studies of isolated populations with claims to unexpected ethnic origins some time ago. The first determined that two Hispanic populations which lay claim to Jewish ancestry, one in Ecuador and one in the American state of Colorado, actually did show evidence of Jewish ancestry.

Modern day Latin America resulted from the encounter of Europeans with the indigenous peoples of the Americas in 1492, followed by waves of migration from Europe and Africa. As a result, the genomic structure of present day Latin Americans was determined both by the genetic structure of the founding populations and the numbers of migrants from these different populations. Here, we analyzed DNA collected from two well-established communities in Colorado (33 unrelated individuals) and Ecuador (20 unrelated individuals) with a measurable prevalence of the BRCA1 c.185delAG and the GHR c.E180 mutations, respectively, using Affymetrix Genome-wide Human SNP 6.0 arrays to identify their ancestry. These mutations are thought to have been brought to these communities by Sephardic Jewish progenitors. Principal component analysis and clustering methods were employed to determine the genome-wide patterns of continental ancestry within both populations using single nucleotide polymorphisms, complemented by determination of Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA haplotypes. When examining the presumed European component of these two communities, we demonstrate enrichment for Sephardic Jewish ancestry not only for these mutations, but also for other segments as well. Although comparison of both groups to a reference Hispanic/Latino population of Mexicans demonstrated proximity and similarity to other modern day communities derived from a European and Native American two-way admixture, identity-by-descent and Y-chromosome mapping demonstrated signatures of Sephardim in both communities. These findings are consistent with historical accounts of Jewish migration from the realms that comprise modern Spain and Portugal during the Age of Discovery. More importantly, they provide a rationale for the occurrence of mutations typically associated with the Jewish Diaspora in Latin American communities.

The second focused on the Melungeons, a population group in Appalachia that most recently has laid claim to Turkish or Middle Eastern ancestry. A study of select families indicates that, in fact, the non-white ancestry in question was sub-Saharan Africa, perhaps the consequence of interracial marriage and relationships in the very early period of American settlement.

The Melungeons were a group of individuals found primarily in Hawkins and Hancock Counties of Tennessee and in the far southern portion of Lee County, Virginia which borders Hawkins and Hancock counties in Tennessee. At one time isolated geographically on and near Newman's Ridge and socially due to their dark countenance, they were known to their neighbors as Melungeons, a term applied as an epithet or in a pejorative manner.

As the stigma of a mixed racial heritage dimmed in the late 20th century and was replaced by a sense of pride, interest in the genealogy and history of the Melungeon people was born. With the advent of the internet and popular press, the story of these people has become larger than life, with their ancestors being attributed to a myriad of exotic sources: Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony, Ottoman Turks, The Lost Tribes of Israel, Jews, Gypsies, descendants of Prince Madoc of Wales, Indians, escaped slaves, Portuguese, Sir Francis Drake's rescued Caribbean Indians and Moorish slaves, Juan Pardo's expedition, De Soto's expedition, abandoned pirates and Black Dutch, among others. Melungeon families themselves claimed to be Indian, white and Portuguese.

Furthermore, as having Melungeon heritage became desirable and exotic, the range of where these people were reportedly found has expanded to include nearly every state south of New England and east of the Mississippi, and in the words of Dr. Virginia DeMarce, Melungeon history has been erroneously expanded to provide "an exotic ancestry...that sweeps in virtually every olive, ruddy and brown-tinged ethnicity known or alleged to have appeared anywhere in the pre-Civil War Southeastern United States."

Given the racial hierarchies of the early 21st century world, it's probably not surprising that Jewish ancestry among these two Hispanic groups is now held as a source of pride--I've read anecdotal reports of many of the American Hispanics converting to Judaism--while the African ancestry is a matter of controversy. (One commenter at the second GNXP post almost seems to imply that there couldn't be any African ancestry among Mulungeons generally since the women were so pretty. Am I reading this wrong, please?)

[URBAN NOTE] "Are Dupont Street’s Bike Lanes Under Threat?"

I live on Dupont Street; I own a bike. Desmond Cole's Torontoist article highlights an issue I'll be paying attention to in the months ahead, notwithstanding my skepticism of the organization formerly known as the Toronto Cyclists Union.

Yesterday, Cycle Toronto (formerly known as the Toronto Cyclists Union) whipped up a furor among cycling advocates by issuing a statement suggesting that Mayor Rob Ford’s office had asked City staff to report on the possibility of removing the Dupont Street bike lanes, and that the whole thing was the idea of councillor Cesar Palacio (Ward 17, Davenport). Cycle Toronto has since retracted the statement, because there appears to be no real substantiation for it.

Here’s what we know, currently, about bike lanes on Dupont:

Have councillors asked staff to remove lanes on Dupont?

No, but last June the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee did ask staff to review options for improving traffic flow along Dupont, especially at the intersection of Dupont Street and Lansdowne Avenue. The Dupont Street bike lanes will inevitably be part of that review.

What else will the report examine?

According to councillor Ana Bailão (Ward 18, Davenport), staff are also exploring traffic-signal synchronization and the installation of a “reversible” middle vehicle lane that would alternate with morning and evening rush hours to provide an extra lane of auto traffic during peak times. (In 2009, a reversible lane on Jarvis Street was removed so that bike lanes could be installed. Council ultimately voted in favour of putting the reversible lane back.)

When will the traffic report be ready?

Councillor Mike Layton (Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina), who sits on the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee, expects the report to be ready by October.
[. . .]

What are councillors (and their staff) saying about potential changes to Dupont’s lanes?

Councillor Ana Bailão:

“I’m not even contemplating that at the moment. We need to see what data city staff come up with… I do have lot of residents saying things have gotten worse since the bike lanes went in. Sometimes perception can be different from the reality. We want to get the public involved. We need to formalize a consultation that will include the cyclists, the people in the neighbourhood, the business owners.”

Councillor Mike Layton:

“This administration has done nothing but remove bike lanes. So if the mayor wants this, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone.”

Mike Makrigiorgos, executive assistant to councillor Cesar Palacio:

“I have no clue what [Cycle Toronto] is talking about. I don’t have any information. We’re very disappointed in Cycle Toronto. We’re saying, ‘If you have any information, show it to us.’”

[BRIEF NOTE] On gaydar

A recent cognitive psychology paper, Joshua A. Tabak and Vivian Zayas' "The Roles of Featural and Configural Face Processing in Snap Judgments of Sexual Orientation", got quite a lot of attention recently for its claims that gaydar--the intuitive ability of a person to identify another's sexual orientation, in this context usually a non-heterosexual one--could be activated simply by the appearance of individual human faces.

Research has shown that people are able to judge sexual orientation from faces with above-chance accuracy, but little is known about how these judgments are formed. Here, we investigated the importance of well-established face processing mechanisms in such judgments: featural processing (e.g., an eye) and configural processing (e.g., spatial distance between eyes). Participants judged sexual orientation from faces presented for 50 milliseconds either upright, which recruits both configural and featural processing, or upside-down, when configural processing is strongly impaired and featural processing remains relatively intact. Although participants judged women’s and men’s sexual orientation with above-chance accuracy for upright faces and for upside-down faces, accuracy for upside-down faces was significantly reduced. The reduced judgment accuracy for upside-down faces indicates that configural face processing significantly contributes to accurate snap judgments of sexual orientation.

This isn't very surprising, coming as it does as part of a slew of findings--outlined, for instance, in David France's 2007 New York Magazine article--pointing to fairly deep biological origins for homosexuality, evidenced in variances from heterosexual norms in areas as diverse as fingerprint patterns and brain structure. Subtle differences in facial appearances aren't out of the realm of the imaginable.

In a recent New York Times opinion peace, Tabak and Zayas described their research and its implications quite nicely.

We conducted experiments in which participants viewed facial photographs of men and women and then categorized each face as gay or straight. The photographs were seen very briefly, for 50 milliseconds, which was long enough for participants to know they’d seen a face, but probably not long enough to feel they knew much more. In addition, the photos were mostly devoid of cultural cues: hairstyles were digitally removed, and no faces had makeup, piercings, eyeglasses or tattoos.

Even when viewing such bare faces so briefly, participants demonstrated an ability to identify sexual orientation: overall, gaydar judgments were about 60 percent accurate.

Since chance guessing would yield 50 percent accuracy, 60 percent might not seem impressive. But the effect is statistically significant — several times above the margin of error. Furthermore, the effect has been highly replicable: we ourselves have consistently discovered such effects in more than a dozen experiments, and our gaydar research was inspired by the work of the social psychologist Nicholas Rule, who has published on the gaydar phenomenon numerous times in the past few years.

We reported two such experiments in PLoS ONE, both of which yielded novel findings. In one experiment, we found above-chance gaydar accuracy even when the faces were presented upside down. Accuracy increased, however, when the faces were presented right side up.

What can we make of this peculiar discovery? It’s widely accepted in cognitive science that when viewing faces right side up, we process them in two different ways: we engage in featural face processing (registering individual facial features like an eye or lip) as well as configural face processing (registering spatial relationships among facial features, like the distance between the eyes or the facial width-to-height ratio). When we view faces upside down, however, we engage primarily in featural face processing; configural face processing is strongly disrupted.

Thus our finding clarifies how people distinguish between gay and straight faces. Research by Professor Rule and his colleagues has implicated certain areas of the face (like the mouth area) in gaydar judgments. Our discovery — that accuracy was substantially greater for right side up faces than for upside-down faces — indicates that configural face processing contributes to gaydar accuracy. Specific facial features will not tell the whole story. Differences in spatial relationships among facial features matter, too.

Consider, for example, facial width-to-height ratio. This is a configural physical feature that differs between men and women (men have a larger ratio) and reflects testosterone release during adolescence in males. Given that stereotypes of gender atypicality — gay men as relatively feminine and gay women as relatively masculine — play a role in how people judge others’ sexual orientation, our finding suggests that cues like facial width-to-height ratio may contribute to gaydar judgments.

Another novel finding: in both experiments, participants were more accurate at judging women’s sexual orientation (64 percent) than at judging men’s (57 percent). Lower gaydar accuracy for men’s faces was explained by a difference in “false alarms”: participants were more likely to incorrectly categorize a straight man as gay than to incorrectly categorize a straight woman as gay.

Why might “false alarm” errors be more common when judging men’s sexual orientation? We speculate that people overzealously interpret whatever facial factors lead us to classify men as gay. That is, it may be that straight men’s faces that are perceived as even slightly effeminate are incorrectly classified as gay, whereas straight women’s faces that are perceived as slightly masculine may still be seen as straight. That would be consistent with how our society applies gender norms to men: very strictly. (Decades of research has established that, at least in our culture, it is considered much more problematic for a boy to play with Barbie dolls than for a girl to play rough-and-tumble sports.)

I love our ingenious era.

[BRIEF NOTE] On bullying of gay children in Canadian Roman Catholic schools

The interview of Xtra!'s Andrea Houston with Tonya Callaghan, an expert on anti-gay dicrimination in publicly-funded Roman Catholic schools in Canada, is worth widely sharing.

It isn't very surprising, mind. As I pointed out on the 30th of last month, the Roman Catholic Church has gone on the record as stating that it opposes only discrimination that it judges to be "unjust", explicitly supporting discrimination against non-heterosexuals in family law, barring non-heterosexuals from multiple professions, and even opposing anti-discrimination provisions on the grounds that they only encourage people and, besides, if you're in the closet you wouldn't be discriminated against. (The policy documents in question were even authored by the current pope!) Since--as my post earlier this night points out--sexual orientation is fairly deeply embedded in human biology, and supposedly therapeutic techniques to change sexual orientation haven't worked, the result of these policies would be to inflict significant harm to non-heterosexual children. Talk of mandating anti-discrimination policies for non-heterosexual children overlooks the fact that Canadian law has a long history of pointing out that the state has a right to intervene to prevent religiously-inspired harm to minors, for instance in the case of Jehovah's Witness parents seeking to prevent their children from receiving blood transfusions.

(I would love it if the Church tried to fight these policies. I would dearly love to see it try.)

A final note: Noteworthy is the large and yawning gap between the official position of the hierarchy and what Roman Catholics actually believe. Looking worldwide, six of the ten nations that recognized same-sex marriage nation-wide--Argentina, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain--have Roman Catholic majorities or pluralities.

When Tonya Callaghan was a teacher at a Calgary Catholic school in 2004, a young gay student at her school killed himself. The tragedy changed the course of her life forever.

Callaghan quit her job, deciding, as a queer woman, she could no longer live in the closet. She went back to university determined to find out why Catholic schools are such “hotbeds of homophobia.”

“The reason is because of Catholic doctrine that directs all the policy and practice in those schools regarding sexual minority groups," she says. "The doctrine flies in the face of the laws of the land and Canadian equality rights.”

Callaghan’s PhD research at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, entitled "Holy Homophobia: Doctrinal Disciplining of Non-Heterosexuals in Canadian Catholic Schools," caught the attention of the Canadian Association for the Study of Women and Education (CASWE), which honoured her with its doctoral award for outstanding dissertation. She presented her work at the group’s conference in Waterloo, Ontario, on May 30.

Callaghan's work also earned her the Governor General's Academic Gold Medal.

The five-year study compared Catholic education in Alberta and Ontario, looking specifically at the experience of students and teachers. Callaghan interviewed 20 people, sometimes multiple times, and generated an enormous amount of data. She says that in the national movement to eradicate faith-based homophobic bullying, Ontario is ground zero.

“My study finds students are leading this revolution,” she says. “That’s not to say the queer teachers aren’t trying. I was a queer Catholic teacher myself once. I tried to do what I could from within the system, but teachers' hands are tied. Many are being fired.”

The former Catholic teacher says she didn’t wait for the school to fire her. After the suicide of the promising Grade 12 drama student, who suffered months of homophobic bullying, she resigned.

“He did seek guidance at school,” she says. “The counsellor gave him the Catholic party line: ‘It’s okay to be gay, just don’t act on it. And if you do act on it, you’re a sinner.’ This boy was being bullied. He asks for help and gets more bullying from the guidance counsellor.

“That’s why the Pastoral Guidelines to Assist Students of Same-Sex Attraction are so dangerous. The bishops insist that the document be taught to everyone, especially guidance counsellors, and disseminated to students. They say ‘same-sex attraction’ because they want it to sound like an illness, which is why you need ‘pastoral care.’”

Based on the Catholic catechism, the Pastoral Guidelines are the primary counselling resource used by Catholic educators. The guidelines state that gay people are “intrinsically disordered” and “gravely depraved.” Callaghan says the doctrine is like bullying to queer youth.