CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World

The Long 9/11: The Economic Crisis and the Fate of the New World Trade Center

As the foreclosure crisis and subsequent economic meltdown have devastated America's cities, it is perhaps unsurprising that observers are evoking the 9/11 attacks to try to describe what they are seeing.

Recently, Tom Engelhardt likened the impact of the economic crisis on New York to a dirty bomb or a "second 9/11", taking the reader on a tour of what remains of his once-vibrant New York neighborhood:

"Broadway in daylight now seems increasingly like an archeological dig in the making. Those storefronts with their fading decals ("Zagat rated") and their old signs look, for all the world, like teeth knocked out of a mouth. In a city in which a section of Broadway was once known as the Great White Way for its profligate use of electricity, and everything normally is aglow at any hour, these dead commercial spaces feel like so many tiny black holes. Get on the wrong set of streets -- Broadway's hardly the worst -- and New York can easily seem like a creeping vision of Hell, not as fire but as darkness slowly snuffing out the blaze of life."

Similarly, the use of the term "ground zero" in regards to the mortgage crisis has become so commonplace that any number of U.S. cities lay claim to the title. Orange County has earned the name because of its onetime concentration of subprime lenders, but Dayton Ohio, Cleveland and Orlando are all apparently "ground zero" for the present crisis, with waves of abandoned houses and displaced residents.  

Now it has been announced that the latest casualty of the economic crisis is the actual Ground Zero itself: a Port Authority study has concluded that the remaining two towers on the former World Trade Center site will not be rebuilt for years, perhaps decades. 

At first glance, this might appear ironic -- that a crisis being described using the rhetoric of 9/11 would in turn derail the rebuilding of the very site that gave rise to the rhetoric itself. It might, that is, if one views these events as distinct. They are not.

The destruction of the World Trade Center was exploited relentlessly by the Bush administration and its partisans in the media and Wall Street to promote a radical and rapacious campaign of aggressive foreign wars and the looting of domestic wealth. Any opposition, dissent or questioning of these policies was labelled as treasonous, even akin to terrorism; for all these policies could be justified with reference to the mourned crater in lower Manhattan. 

Now, between the costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, domestic tax cuts and exotic, unregulated forms of financial thuggery, the American economy has been shattered. The debris -- scattered across the nation in hundreds of communities -- includes abandoned homes, homeless families, shuttered businesses and halted construction projects. 

Among them, the new World Trade Center. 

The Bush Administration and those who blindly supported them in everything they did must now bear part of the responsibility for the perhaps fatal harm done to this site, this symbol they so fervently exploited in their ruthless campaign to reshape the country and the world. 

Bush may or may not have been able to prevent the destruction of the original World Trade Center. But his policies since may well have made its full reconstruction impossible.    

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"A Bar Street" -- Not so Cool

On Sunday, April 12th, the Winnipeg Free Press ran a ridiculous op-ed by University of Manitoba film student Jeff Schellenberg entitled "A Bar Street - Cool!" While the piece runs for 843 words, its essence may be gleaned by its opening sentences:

"I think Winnipeg needs a bar street. Wouldn't a bar street be cool? Imagine -- one small street with nothing but bars...Winnipeg city council should construct a bar street."

Never mind that the author clearly has no idea how urban development actually happens (city council can authorize and fund public works like bus rapid transit, but cannot "construct" a strip of private businesses). 

No, what is truly astonishing about the piece is the complete failure of its author to understand the nature of good city life. The key to successful urbanism is diversity. A range of stores, shops, apartments, houses, restaurants and -- yes -- bars and nightclubs are the ingredients for a successful urban district that people will want to live in and come back to on a regular basis.

By contrast, Schellenberg's vision -- in his words, "one small street with nothing but bars" -- would be a social and economic disaster. The sheer concentration of venues for alcohol would mean that the "social interaction" he promotes would likely deteriorate fairly regularly into anti-social interactions such as brawls, to say nothing of being a magnet for prostitution and drug dealing. Inevitably, the negative spillover into surrounding neighbourhoods would lead to declining property values and the abandonment of the area by families.

As well, a strip with a concentration of any one kind of business is deadly for urban economic vitality as it does not have 24-hour use (heaven forbid) and would be vulnerable to changes in the wider economy.

Yes, Mr. Schellenberg, a bar street certainly would "radically change the reputation of this city." I'm sorry that you feel there is nothing in this city you can take pride in. Perhaps when you are a little older and no longer haunting pubs you'll see that this is actually a pretty terrific -- and diverse -- city.

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Towards Ecologically Literate Universities

Nearly 20 years ago, David Orr gave a famous commencement address in which he chastised our educational institutions for turning out endless streams of ecologically illiterate graduates:

"In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we've fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are."

Since then, this illusion of wealth has dissolved, and this "incomplete education" is surely one of the core factors behind our global economy's present dissolution, overseen as it has been by a degreed and credentialed elite emerging from the world's finest educational institutions. At the same time the perceived disconnection of this economy from the ecosystems on which it depends has only gotten more profound, in particular concerning its dependency on ever-diminishing supplies of oil.

Educator Jason Peters, writing in Orion magazine, believes that our cultural myopia about our civilizations' tenuous existence is largely owed to the fact that most academics are not just peddlers of ecological illiteracy but are actually destroyers of place:

"[Those] of us with impeccable academic credentials...are the confessors of an educational creed that dismisses the value of the domestic arts and sends graduates out into a world of surrendered skills and purchased necessities. We are the diploma retailers who have allowed students to assume that the machines and the ungraduated will supply all their real needs. We have let these students major in Getting Ahead. We have strip-mined the local talent, converted it into 'graduates,' and shipped it to Big Important Places. Deracinated and deracinating vandals that we are, chasers of whatever grant money inflates our egos, we have taught students to be as we are: citizens of every place, which is to say citizens of no place—that is, not citizens at all, but parasites."

To begin to resolve this damage, Peters proposes that the University needs to take up a new function: that of actually connecting students and faculty to the community and the natural region in which it exists. Much as David Orr advised that all education needs to be environmental education, Peters envisions the academy as an anchor to nature:

"On every campus we need large, highly visible vegetable gardens that are tended by everyone who likes to eat; cafeterias that provide, insofar as they can, only local foods; compost heaps steaming next to these cafeterias to remind us to pay our debt to the soil. We need administrators committed to dismantling, not enlarging, our vast system of technological dependencies, and professors committed to living defensibly and responsibly and competently before their students. Our foreign studies programs must become local studies programs."

There are encouraging signs that universities are coming around: Many universities are engaging in ambitious environmental objectives, including efforts to reduce energy consumption and their waste streams.

However, authors R. Michael M'Gonigle, Justine Starke and Briony Penn believe much more is needed. In their 2006 book Planet U, they position the University as a necessary linchpin in the transition to an ecologically balanced society. Universities, they write, have often been at the forefront of social and political change. Campus protests in the 1960s, for example, helped turn the American public against the war in Vietnam. Now, however, we are facing a deepening global crisis and the very institutions most needed to address it are exacerbating it through their failure to make the necessary connections between their mission and the problems we face. As they put it, "a gap exists between what we learn for tomorrow and what tomorrow needs from us today" (p.12).

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