[PHOTO] Into the distance

On the TTC's new subway cars, the horizon recedes almost indefinitely into the distance.

[URBAN NOTE] "Schrödinger’s Detroit"

Misha Lepetic's worthwhile essay at 3 Quarks Daily contests the utility of different conveniently and compactly packaged narratives to describe cities, using as case in point storied Detroit.

Is Detroit alive or dead? It depends, I suppose, on your viewpoint, or what kind of attention you might be paying in the first place. In January, the New York Times previewed a brief little docu on scrap metal ‘salvagers’ in Detroit (or are they thieves? As always, this depends on your point of view). At any rate, it highlighted for me what are two emerging – and competing – narratives of Detroit. These two narratives – I’ll call them ‘ruin porn’ versus ‘our very own Berlin’ – provoke attention for two reasons. The first is the reminder that contradictory views can be maintained with equanimity within and about the same built environment. This is not so difficult to countenance, since cities do support many seemingly contradictory narratives. In fact, cities are exceptionally adept at this, and is one of the chief reasons what makes them so enjoyable. The second reason is more interesting, however, since it provides some insights into how we choose to look at cities.

Detroit’s ruin porn narrative has gotten lots of play over the years. I remember the first time I ever heard it, actually – as a punchline in the Kentucky Fried Movie, ca. 1977. Since then, as received wisdom would have it, Detroit has had plenty of time and opportunity to keep at this downward trajectory. More recently, art book browsers could enjoy a chorus line of weighty photo-essays appealing to our rubbernecking tendencies: please consider the fact that these three books were all published within the span of a year (although I have to ask, where is Robert Polidori when you really need him?).

Add to this list the Times’s featured doc-let, which is in fact a trailer for a feature-length effort called ‘Detropia’ recently shown at Sundance and soon to be premiering at the IFC Center in New York (I’m assuming that ‘detritus’+‘topia’=‘Detropia’. Got that? Ok, good). This is dystopia at its finest: when it’s not dark, everything is grey, muddy, cold and generally nicely prepped for the end of the world. When they’re not pulling down decrepit factory buildings for scrap using badly outclassed pickup trucks, these Detropians are a grumpy, hard-scrabble lot that crack wise while warming themselves by a trash fire. I don’t know about the rest of the film, but the city depicted in the trailer is a place where I wouldn’t settle for anyone less than Snake Plisskin as my tour guide cum personal security detail. In any case, all our narrative is missing is some Chinese guy in a shiny suit peeling off a few hundred yuan as payment, and we would be all set for globalization’s last act.

[. . .]

But, like the soils of Detroit, contradictions within the resurrection narrative continue to bloom. In fact, urban agriculture is just the beginning for Detroit, since, once your belly is full, it’s time to make art. Here is where conceptualizing Detroit as “our very own Berlin” passes Go and collects $200. It says something about our facile self-regard as a society that we accept (expect?) the media’s simplistic leapfrog from the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy to the top; why wait any longer to become the next TriBeCa? It occurs to me that there might be a few more steps between cultivating vegetables in your garden and cultivating artists in your gallery, but not much of that stuff in between makes for really good copy. Exhibit A here is Richard Florida dressing up accountants as members of the “creative class” to give his über-theory the play it needed.

I am, of course, being unnecessarily waggish. Jane Jacobs, whose greatest gift to us was her endless supply of common sense, wrote of the importance of old building stock as vital capital for new ideas and commerce (187ff). The fact that Detroit has plenty of supply, low density and therefore low rents makes her prescription correct at this moment, even in the eyes of contemporary critics such as Edward Glaeser (who would doubtless welcome the eventual manifestation of people like John Hantz as proof positive of progress). And certainly no one disputes that it will take Richard Scarry’s full assortment of townspeople to establish a credible revitalization of any real duration. But – and this is the interesting bit – Detroit somehow inspires people to compare it to Berlin. Why is this? After all, Berlin is flat, spread out, not dense, cheap and therefore full of artists and designers. Both Berlin and Detroit were, in their respective heydays, economic powerhouses and centers of industrial innovation. Moreover, both cities are considered epicenters of techno music. So Detroit must be our Berlin, right?

The whole essay's worth a read.

[LINK] "White People Don't Understand"

Andrew Barton introduced me to the controversy surrounding the racism presented in American YA writer Victoria Holt's novel Save the Pearls, and the terrible, terrible decisions made by the editorial staff of Weird Tales in defending their decision to publish a chapter.

Painful, all of it. Also, what Andrew says.

Save the Pearls: Revealing Eden by Victoria Foyt dovetails with the whole "crapsack dystopia" thing that appears to be common in Young Adult novels lately, [but] it takes a sharp turn away from the pack with the way it treats racism. See, Save the Pearls is set in a world where whites are the weak, oppressed lower class, known as "pearls," and society is dominated by black people, called "coals."

Are you beginning to see the issue already?

That doesn't even cover the use of blackface, references to black characters as "beastly," and so on. The book's reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly negative, and as of this writing it has a two-star review due mainly to a handful of higher reviews... including that of Marvin Kaye, editor of Weird Tales magazine, who calls it "a thoroughly non-racist book." I, for one, am relieved by the assurances of this aging white man that it's non-racist. I mean, if you can't trust a white man who grew up in the mid-20th century as the final arbiter of whether or not something is racist, who can you trust?

For the record, I don't think that Save the Pearls was written to be racist, or that the $100 bill was redesigned for that reason. Instead, it's more of a problem that's endemic to white authors tackling racism--they don't understand it, but they think they do anyway, and they are incapable of recognizing how the unspoken assumptions of their upbringing affect their work. They are taking something they don't understand and filtering it through their own lens, a lens that does not see things in quite the same way as other people do.

[LINK] "The silencing of hate"

Phil Plait's post speaks to a particular forum of online social dysfunction--to wit, misogyny in the gaming and skeptic communities--but the points that he makes in this article, the introduction of which is excerpted below, are universally relevant. Primal primate display tactics are things we need to remind ourselves to move away from.

What the hell is going on in the online community?

If you’ve been reading or paying attention at all to any of the online cultures like skepticism or general geekery (scifi, gaming, convention-going, and so on), you’ll have seen astonishing and depressing displays of sexism. That’s been true for a long time. But recently some sort of sea change has occurred, and what we’re seeing now is a marked increase in outright misogyny and thuggery.

The examples are so distressingly ubiquitous I hardly need point them out. A woman gamer wants to make a documentary showing misogyny in video games, and she gets rape and death threats. Rebecca Watson calmly and rationally tells men not to hit on women in enclosed spaces and reaps a supernova of hate and irrational vitriol. And now we’re seeing death threats, rape threats, all kinds of violent threats, against women who are simply trying to improve the way they are treated at meetings as well as online.

This. Must. Stop.

I am a skeptic and a scientist. I know what’s it like to feel anger and frustration toward implacable forces I think are threatening my way of existence. You may feel this way about many things as well. And while you and I may disagree on some of these topics, the way to work out our disagreements is through the exchange of ideas via honorable words and actions.

Threats, dickery, bullying, hate, insults, mob-baiting, and humiliation are not honorable actions and must not be used. You want to change my mind? You want to win my heart to your cause? Then argue your case logically and based on evidence. If you have to resort to the kind of crap we’re seeing now, then maybe your convictions aren’t as rationally based as you think they are.

Look, I know people are angry. Some of them have the right to be. As I have said many times, anger is natural, anger can be warranted, and anger can be a great motivator. But it must not lead to hatred. Unfocused anger, uncontrolled anger, cannot lead anywhere but away from a goal. Once hatred leaks in through those cracks, rational discussion is dead.

[LINK] "Bonobo genius makes stone tools like early humans did"

The two possible explanations for one bonobo's tool creation and tool usage as presented by New Scientist's Hannah Krakauer--high levels of intelligence or cultural diffusion from human beings--are equally remarkable to me.

Eviatar Nevo of the University of Haifa in Israel and his colleagues sealed food inside a log to mimic marrow locked inside long bones, and watched Kanzi, a 30-year-old male bonobo chimp, try to extract it. While a companion bonobo attempted the problem a handful of times, and succeeded only by smashing the log on the ground, Kanzi took a longer and arguably more sophisticated approach.

Both had been taught to knap flint flakes in the 1990s, holding a stone core in one hand and using another as a hammer. Kanzi used the tools he created to come at the log in a variety of ways: inserting sticks into seams in the log, throwing projectiles at it, and employing stone flints as choppers, drills, and scrapers. In the end, he got food out of 24 logs, while his companion managed just two.

Perhaps most remarkable about the tools Kanzi created is their resemblance to early hominid tools. Both bonobos made and used tools to obtain food – either by extracting it from logs or by digging it out of the ground. But only Kanzi's met the criteria for both tool groups made by early Homo: wedges and choppers, and scrapers and drills.

Do Kanzi's skills translate to all bonobos? It's hard to say. The abilities of animals like Alex the parrot, who could purportedly count to six, and Betty the crow, who crafted a hook out of wire, sometimes prompt claims about the intelligence of an entire species. But since these animals are raised in unusual environments where they frequently interact with humans, their cases may be too singular to extrapolate their talents to their brethren.

[LINK] "Tool-Making Bonobos Give Glimpse of Human Origins"

Wired Science's Brandon Keim has more on tool-using bonobos.

Unlike their chimpanzee cousins, bonobos — formally known Pan paniscus to the chimps’ Pan troglodytes — have shown limited toolmaking ability, and are better known for their relatively gentle, highly amorous natures. Yet that doesn’t mean bonobos are intrinsically incapable of tool use, which anthropologists consider to be a crucial cognitive benchmark. Their potential may simply have gone untapped.

Roffman and colleagues worked with Kanzi and Pan-Banisha, a pair of bonobos living at the Great Ape Trust, who in the 1990s had been taught to shape tools from flint. In the new study, published Aug. 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the two bonobos are described using those techniques decades later to crack open food-filled logs used as research substitutes for marrow-rich bones.

Holding a flint core in their right hands and hammer stones in their left, both bonobos made small, sharp-edged scrapers. Kanzi, the handier of the pair, also made choppers, wedges and drills. Altogether, his toolset resembled the famous implements made 2.6 million years ago by ancestral dwellers of what is now the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Indeed, the marks left by Kanzi’s tools on his logs were strikingly similar to wear patterns seen in ancient butchered bones.

“Only early Homo was thought to produce such tool use markings,” wrote Roffman’s team. “Here we report that present-day Pan also has such competencies.”

“What is interesting here is that they use these tools for specific actions that could have been performed by our ancestors, like digging for food underground or extracting bone marrow,” said primatologist Thibaud Gruber of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, who also studies bonobo tool use. He called the results “an important finding,” underscoring the likelihood that the last common ancestor of bonobos, chimps and humans possessed toolmaking abilities.

As Gruber and the study’s authors pointed out, Kanzi and Pan-Banisha are no ordinary bonobos. Aside from their tool-making training, they’ve lived around humans their entire lives, and use pictorial symbols to engage in complex dialog with their human handlers. Kanzi and Pan-Banisha’s level of toolmaking sophistication probably doesn’t exist in wild bonobos.

Yet rather than being a caveat, that may be a central lesson of the results, said primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a study co-author and head scientist at the Great Ape Trust. Other bonobos can make stone tools, but it’s these two individuals, whose vocabulary includes 480 word symbols and who understand thousands of English words, who make tools best.

[. . .]
According to Savage-Rumbaugh, present-day Pan, both bonobos and chimpanzees, possess that cognitive advance. Whether it’s readily apparent is simply a function of circumstance. “The proper cultural and ecological conditions could serve to bootstrap a complex stone tool technology in Pan,” she said.

Findings like these drive home the importance of protecting chimpanzees and bonobos, which in the wild are going extinct, said Roffman. We’re literally preserving a living piece of our own heritage. “We have looked to the stars searching for contact with intelligent beings,” he said. “However, they have been with us all along, and are called Pan.”

[DM] "A second note on the import of statistics"

I've a post up at Demography Matters, a follow-up to my post last Monday about basic demographic figures only being indicative of possible futures. These figures don't determine futures, true, but they do indicate them.