Explaining Block Size/Lot Sizes in the Urban Fabric

An interesting discussion has emerged on The Practice of New Urbanism listserv (PRO-URB@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU) regarding the incredible variation that exists within the United States in terms of block sizes in the urban fabric. What started the discussion was a post about the American Grid on the blog, Greater Greater Washington (http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=6002). This was followed by another blog entry on the same blog (http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=6014&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GreaterGreaterWashington+%28Greater+Greater+Washington%29eaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=6014&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GreaterGreaterWashington+%28Greater+Greater+Washington%29ngton+%28Greater+Greater+Washington%29rgreaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=6014&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GreaterGreaterWashington+%28Greater+Greater+Washington%29)


Here is my weigh-in on the topic . . .


This has been a very interesting discussion that underscores one very important point: block size is an extraordinarily complicated issue that probably has been influenced by a number of different factors! Which factors get activated (and how and why they do) is going to vary from place to place, making a one-size-fits-all explanation an exercise in futility.

Going back to the original blog entry (the accompanying poster/graphic of block size variations in U.S. cities is fantastic and speaks to my geo-geeky soul!!), there may be some credence to the idea that climate/local environmental conditions (carrying capacity) has something to do with block size in *some* places--but not in the way that the original blog entries argue.

In the American Great Plains (where I grew up), towns were often planned slightly in advance of agricultural settlement--largely as speculative real estate ventures. Some "developers" had little to no experience or understanding of what they were doing and simply threw down a grid (or some other geometric scheme) within the large plot they had purchased within the U.S. rectangular land survey system, hoping that their cartographic expression of established, eastern urbanity would convey the message that "this place is going to be a success!"

Whether or not their schemes worked depended upon three things: 1) emerging rural settlement and agricultural productivity levels in the hinterland immediately surrounding the new town (which was to a large degree dependent upon environmental/climatic conditions), 2) transportation/communication connections between the hinterland/new town as well as the new town/larger market places elsewhere, and 3) affordability/potential value-added derived from owning property within the town. If the hinterland was productive, the connections were good, and the property appropriately priced, then the town/real estate venture stood a chance because there would be demand for the lots. If any of those things didn't fall into place, the town might languish until external conditions changed. Or, it might fail altogether (Mark Twain wrote quite gleefully about some of the places that failed in *Life on the Mississippi*).

The larger point is that other speculator/town builders were really savvy about all of this. They understood the boosterism that needed to surround the launch of a place, just as developers understand the importance of branding their real estate projects today. Building the image of success was critical. Having a town plan that emulated other ALREADY SUCCESSFUL places was often a part of this.

They also understood the importance of attracting merchants--so, as Dennis McClendon pointed out in his post--things like corner (and oversized but cheap) lots become really important toward INCUBATING what ultimately becomes Main Street/the CBD. Plus, they understood the delicate dance between pricing the residential lots low enough to attract the critical mass necessary to get the town off the ground and making enough lots and charging enough for them to cover the initial outlay for the land.

The calculus of how many lots were going to be needed to recoup the original investment and generate some profit in conjunction with the 'civic impression' the developers wanted to make ('high density [small lots] = good impression because we're hustling and bustling' or 'density = bad impression because now we look like those horrible places Back East', 'wide streets = bright future' v. 'wide streets' = too much land removed from potential profit making) might have more to do with the variation in both lot and block size in many places than anything else.

Historians and historical geographers who have written about this in some fashion include Bill Cronon, *Nature's Metropolis*, Tim Mahoney, *River Towns in the Great West*, Richard Francaviglia, *Main Street*, and Hildegard Binder Johnson, *Order Upon the Land*.

I also wrote about it in my work on the model industrial town outside Pittsburgh that the Olmsted firm planned during the 1890s: Vandergrift, PA (*Capital's Utopia*, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). In fact, this whole issue of lot and block size became a major bone of contention between the Olmsted firm and their client, the Apollo Iron and Steel Company.

The steel company had initially said that it wanted the Olmsteds to create "something better than the best" existing industrial settlement ANYWHERE, and they wanted a full complement of infrastructure to be a part of that. Given that this was all happening right after the Pullman and Homestead Strikes, the company also wanted to minimize its long-term engagement within a residential rental market. Homeownership for the workers via the provision of mortgages was going to be a part of this plan.

The Olmsted kids (John, Rick [to some degree], and Charles Eliot--FLO Sr was in the sanitarium by this point) responded by creating this beautiful plan with wide streets, a village green, BIG BLOCKS, large lots, ample lobes to the curves in the streets, parklets punctuating major AND minor intersections, etc.

But . . . when the company sat down with engineers about the sewers, watermains, sidewalks, and street lights, found out how much all of that was going to cost, and then did the math based on how much they would have to charge per lot in the Olmsted plan, they realized they were never, ever going to be able to break even--because steel workers would never be able to afford those lots. Thus begins months of testy negotiations between the company and the Olmsteds over how to tighten up the street grid and the lot sizes within the grid without sacrificing the infrastructure and all of the benefits of having an Olmsted-esque plan.


You can see tangible results of this negotiation in the Olmsted's final presentation of the plan. The streets and lots on the left-hand side of the map were surveyed as mapped and were the first section of the town to be built. The right-hand side (the really curvy streets with all of that open parkland) were part of the original Olmsted plan but were never built that way. Notice the huge lot and block size in comparison to what actually was created.




In the end, John Olmsted was really unhappy with how the town turned out--he thought too much of the original vision had been sacrificed to economics. The steel company (and ultimately the residents) were pretty happy, however. The lots sold, costs were recouped, the steel company could handpick who it got who to sell to (non-unionists for its mill!) and the place looked far better than any other steel town in western PA--there were still curvilinear streets, some parklets, a small village green--and all of that infrastructure, including indoor toilets! Plus most of the housing was owned by the workers. Because of all of this, Ida Tarbell (who had been very critical earlier in her muckraking career about capital's treatment of labor) ended up declaring Vandergrift the most important industrial town in America because of the good 'social contract' it represented--even with the small lots and blocks!

Finally: here's one more interesting complication to the block/lot size conundrum. James Vance speculated in his book *The Continuing City*, that lot sizes (and hence, block sizes) in many European cities were influenced by the MODAL SIZE OF TREES in forests surrounding nascent towns in the Middle Ages. When towns were growing 'organically', tree size = timber length = beam length = lot width!

And this is urban historical geography???

Since exiting grad school, I’ve been lucky enough to teach on a yearly basis a course in my specialty field: urban historical geography. At first, the content of my syllabus reflected the objectivist ways in which historical geographers tended to view the world in the 1980s. Thus I taught about the changing physical morphology, economic functions, social ecology, and spatial politics of cities as they transitioned through ancient, feudal, mercantile, industrial, and post-industrial forms—using James Vance’s The Continuing City as the principle text. As human geography took its subjectivist turn, however, my course followed suit. Urban historical geography began to mimic the more literal meanings of its constituent parts; it became an exploration of the ways in which the subject views, perceives, and writes about (or otherwise represents) cities of, and in, the past. During this transition, I used David Ward’s Poverty, Ethnicity and the American City, then Josef Konvitz’ The Urban Millenium, and then Christine Boyer’s The City of Collective Memory before giving up on a single text altogether and adopting a reader-driven format.



By 2003, I had completely abandoned a chronologic approach to urban historical geography for a systematic/topical one that revolved around the idea of the “city as palimpsest.” As I put it:

“The dictionary defines a palimpsest as a parchment, written upon several times, where the earlier writing has been completely or partially erased to make room for new writing. Such erasures and additions can utterly change the meaning of the text that has been encoded. Cities are similar in that after they are built, bits and pieces of them get: 1) modified through functional and interpretational changes, 2) razed because they are deemed outmoded, 3) preserved or frozen in place because their forms and/or functions are thought to be of some lasting value, 4) resurrected either physically or conceptually after having been destroyed and 5) forgotten about or overlooked entirely. As these sorts of changes occur, so too do changes occur in how we look at these urban elements, how we invest in them financially and emotionally, and how we depict them—in literature, art, newspapers, maps, etc. Our goals are to : a) understand the urban palimpsest by identifying its constituent elements and b) understand the dynamics, trends and histories behind the creation, re-creation, and representation of those elements.”

I started this course by making a contrast between linear narratives of urban evolution—the kind espoused by John Borchert and John Adams—and non-linear, pixellated narratives as best exemplified by Michael Dear and Stephen Flusty’s model of urban keno capitalism. From there, we explored the different urban conditions that the palimpsest metaphor suggests: de novo (built from scratch) urban landscapes and cities, and aging landscapes and cities that included ones that had been lost, petrified, resurrected, or intentionally ignored. In each of these categories we went deep historically but we also spent quite a bit of time engaging urban representations of the more recent past—through feature-length films, television programs, and music video.



Although I had never been happier leading a course built in this way, some students (particularly undergraduate non-geography majors) did not like the palimpsest metaphor at all. History is supposed to be about chronology, they felt, and I had failed to teach that. I was not, however, going to be forced by their evaluations back into a straight-jacket of chronology, and into the privileging of temporality over spatiality just because their consumer expectations were not satisfied. Tenure does have some privileges.



So I took a year off from teaching Urban Historical Geography to re-think.

In the meantime . . . my personal life intruded into the professional in a rather unexpected way.



Our home in upstate New York is set in a glorious location from May through November; from December to April, it is transformed by lake effect snow into tundra-like conditions by 150+ inches of snow. To cope, our neighbors usually take advantage of two week-long K-12 school breaks (one in February, another in April) and head south, often to the Carolinas, Florida, the Caribbean or Mexico. In 2006, our children were 8 and 6 years old. They griped continually that they were the only ones in their classes not to have been to Walt Disney World in Orlando. After some debate over whether or not we could live with ourselves for having supported capitalist cultural hegemony, those sweet, loving, “pretty please” faces won out and we decided to make the trip. Besides, we already owned at least $500-worth of Disney merchandise in the form of videos and DVDs. We might as well throw another $1K at The Mouse. After three nights scouring the web for tips on the best way to plan this adventure, we ultimately concluded that it might just be easier and more cost effective to buy an all-inclusive package offered by AAA that would have us stay ‘on property’ in a Disney resort hotel. Easier, hah! Figuring out how to put our meal plan into action by making restaurant reservations so the kids could dine with Disney characters, and still allow time for the four parks in between had me nearly apoplectic up until three weeks before we made our way south.

I’ll skip the details of our arrival at the hotel and go straight to the Magic Kingdom—the oldest of the four parks at the WDW complex and the one that is closely patterned after Disneyland in Anaheim, CA. I should mention that growing up I had been to Disneyland twice: once when I was 10 (the year after my father died) and then again when I was 17 when a pen-friend visited from Germany and we decided to make her Disney Wish come true. I had a wonderful time on both of those trips. The first had been a momentary escape from the nightmare of grief that had engulfed my family after my dad’s death; Pirates of the Caribbean, It’s a Small World After All, and the GE Carousel of Progress whisked me away to other places and times and made me smile again. The second trip (the one with the German friend) had been something of a rite of passage, given that Marion and I stayed without adult supervision at the park from opening until closing for a couple of days. This should not have been a big deal, given that I already had a car and sometimes drove from my home in Lincoln, Nebraska to faraway places like Omaha, Kansas City, and Grand Island without parental detection. But California was a really, really long way from Nebraska—it had taken us more than a week to get there. And the park was playing host not simply to families, but to EVERYONE . . . . including young men on the prowl. We were thin, cute, flirtatious, and quickly learned how to scam the boys for their A-ride tickets and then abandon them in the crowded craziness of the after-ride packing-up routine. We saw Tavares ("Heaven Must be Missing an Angel") and Elvin Bishop ("Fooled Around and Fell in Love") at the evening concerts in front of the castle. It was a blast.

In being so worried about the details of the 2006 trip, I had forgotten all about Disneyland 1969 and 1976. That is, until we walked out from under the Magic Kingdom Railway overpass and into the humid Florida sunshine and the Town Square. While the scale at which the buildings are constructed is slightly larger than the 5/8ths of Disneyland, and the architectural flourishes differ somewhat (more gingerbreading in FL), there was in Orlando more-than-enough of the McKinley Era design that Walt and his Imagineers had concocted for Anaheim for me to recognize the similarities and to be, in the bat of eye, transported back to my childhood. And in an emotional rush that I could never have predicted, in front of Tony’s Restaurante, I stood weeping—my husband baffled and my children completely distraught over Mommy’s reaction to the Happiest Place on Earth.



“Yes, yes! I’m okay! It’s just . . . . I was here when I was a little girl.”

“Anne, this place didn’t exist when you were a little girl.”

“Yes it did. In California. I went here in California.”

Carl looked at me strangely--like I had lost my mind.



And I started to laugh. The academic geographer in me heard what I had just said and what his look had just underscored, bolded, italicized in 56 point font.


I went here in California.

‘Wow. David Harvey. Space-Time Compression. California = Florida? That Walt Disney Guy . . . Effing Genius!’

And from that minute onward, I went through the rest of our WDW sojourn experiencing it as a mommy, a spouse, and . . . as really conflicted critical geographer. While we stood in those seemingly endless medusa lines (for Splash Mountain and Buzz Lightyear . . . again . . . and again . . . and again . . . . ), I found myself lecturing—sometimes aloud, sometimes in my head—about the relationship between EPCOT and world’s fairs, about the design psychology of casinos/’on property’ and the retention of the captive audience, about Guy de Bord and urban spectacles, and about Disney signs and ‘real life’ referents. I also found myself struggling with my complicit support of something that I had heard routinely exploited labor and that had behaved over the years as a powerful instrument in the spread of American cultural hegemonies and urban imaginaries.



After a particularly long soliloquy about all this 'goo', my husband turned to me and said, “You ought to lead a seminar on this stuff.” To which I think I said, “Wow. The Magic Kingdom as the Organizing Framework to Geography 564.”

The resulting course, as it was taught in 2007:


(Taken from the 2007 syllabus)



Geography 564: Urban Historical Geography
“Disney and the City”
(readings have been removed from this rendition)

Walt Disney’s films, Disneyland and its sibling theme parks, the new town of Celebration, Florida, and even the revitalized Times Square in New York City, all reflect in some way Disney’s utopian vision for American society. We will discover that this vision was quite complex, underpinned by a number of seemingly incongruent dimensions. Disney, for example, wanted to foster playful, carefree, and high-quality imaginary worlds—both physical and cinematic—to which humanity could escape. He found, however, that the creation and maintenance of such worlds required not only a great deal of planning and infrastructural development, but over time increasingly elaborate means of social control. Thus his vision never quite lived up to his expectations, due to financial constraints and his inability to keep the tawdriness of the ‘real world’ away—from his studio, from the presentation of his works to the public, and from the parks he and his successors would create.

This course takes a critical look at both the cinematic and landscape expressions of a specific component of Disney’s utopian vision which pertain to the urban form. We will examine Disney’s life, work, and Disney corporate history and will touch upon various theories and methodologies that might help us understand better the urban landscapes from which Disney took inspiration and tried to recast according to his vision (including medieval, colonial, Southern, Midwestern, and Western towns and cities). Organized as a virtual fieldtrip around the various Disneyland and Walt Disney World realms (e.g. Main Street USA, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, etc.), the course also looks at the urban form that Disney worked to avoid through strict centralized control over landscape design, infrastructure planning and maintenance, labor relations, and crowd dynamics: the modern industrial city (New York City and Chicago, Illinois serving as archetypes.) While so much of Disney’s work reflects a decidedly anti-urban bias, we will discover that the utopian vision he developed could never truly break free of the rather traditional urban settlement forms that he otherwise reviled.

Some of the filmed material that we will be viewing:

“Lady and the Tramp” (excerpts)
“Traffic Trouble” (entirety)
“The Country Mouse” (entirety)
“Pinocchio” (excerpts)
“Disneyland USA” (one episode)
“Cars” (excerpts)
“Ken Burns’ ‘New York: Power and the People, 1898-1918’” (entirety)
“Great Old Amusement Parks” (entirety)
“Ken Burns’ ‘New York: City of Tomorrow, 1929-1941”’ (entirety)
“Beauty and the Beast” (excerpts)
“Ken Burns’ ‘New York: The Country and the City, 1609-1825’” (entirety)
“Charlie Rose Interview with Michael Eisner” (entirety)
“Toy Story II” (excerpts)
“Monsters, Inc.” (excerpts)


SCHEDULE

January 22 Disney and the Cinematic and Imagineered Landscape
Hour 1: Introduction to the Course
Hour 2: “Cinematic and Imagineered Landscapes” (Lecture) (Viewing excerpts from “Lady and the Tramp”)
Hour 3: “Disney’s Cinematic Urban Landscapes” (Discussion of Assignment #1—Due in class February 12th)

January 29 Constructing and Deconstructing Disney’s Cinematic Urban Landscape
Hour 1: Viewing and discussing “Traffic Trouble”
Hour 2: Viewing and discussing “The Country Cousin” (1936)
Hour 3: Viewing and discussing “Pinocchio” excerpts


February 5 Constructing and Deconstructing the Imagineered Landscape
Hour 1: Viewing “Disneyland, USA”
Hour 2: Discussion of “Disneyland USA”
Hour 3: Disneyland as an Absolute Space, a Representational Space, and a Space of Representation (LECTURE)


February 12 Archetype: Marceline and Main Street USA
Hour 1: “Progressive Historical Geographies of the American City” (LECTURE)
Hour 2: “Main Street Ascendance, Demise and Revival”/Viewing excerpts from “Cars” (LECTURE)
Hour 3: Discussion about the Term Paper Assignment


February 19 Arch-archetypes: New York City and Chicago
Hour 1: “Asa Brigg’s ‘Shock Cities’” (LECTURE)
Hour 2: Viewing: “New York: Power and the People, 1898-1918”
Hour 3: Discussion of Reading and “New York”

February 26 Mass Amusement in the City
Hour 1: Viewing “Great Old Amusement Parks”
Hour 2: Discussion of “Inside the Mouse”
Hour 3: “The Rise and Implications of Urban Planning” (LECTURE)


March 5 Ordering the Disorderly Metropolis
Hour 1: Viewing “New York: City of Tomorrow, 1929-1941”
Hour 2: Discussion of reading and “New York”
Hour 3: Writing the Midterm Exam


March 19 EXAM/Fantasy Land as Medieval Castle Town
Hour 1: Exam
Hour 2: “The Medieval Walled City: Function and Form”/excerpts from “Beauty and the Beast” (LECTURE)
Hour 3: Discussion of Assignment #2: “Imagineered Landscapes”


March 26 Colonialism in Adventureland/Adventurism in Colonialland
Hour 1: The Colonial Other at Disneyparks (group work) [please bring your wireless laptop to class if you have one!]
Hour 2: Discussion of group work discoveries
Hour 3: “Othered landscapes . . . Métropole et outre-mer—Paris, Indo-China, Morroco, and Madagascar” (LECTURE)


April 2 Liberty and New Orleans Squares—Mercantile Urbanism
Hour 1: Discussion of Vance’s “Prince’s Capital and the Merchant’s Town”/excerpts from “Pocahontas II
Hour 2: Viewing “New York: The Country and the City, 1609-1825”
Hour 3: Discussion of “New York”


April 9 Frontierland: Frontier Urbanism
Hour 1: “The Implications of the Turner Thesis for Urban Studies” (LECTURE)
Hour 2: Disney’s American West Abroad (group work) [please bring your wireless laptop to class if you have one]
Hour 3: Discussion of group work discoveries


April 16 Tomorrowland: Modernist Renditions of the Future City
Hour 1: “Cities of Tomorrow and Disney’s Utopian Vision” (LECTURE)
Hour 2: “EPCOT” (LECTURE)
Hour 3: Writing the Second Exam


April 23 EXAM/Neo-liberal Disney I: D’eisner World
Hour 1: EXAM
Hour 2: Viewing “Charlie Rose Interview with Michael Eisner”
Hour 3: Discussion of Neo-liberalism and the Interview


April 30 PARTY/Neo-liberal Disney II: Pixar Urbanism
Hour 1: Viewing “Toy Story II” and “Monster, Inc.” excerpts
Hour 2: Pixar Urbanism (lecture/discussion)
Hour 3: Course Conclusion


END OF SYLLABUS

_________________________________________________________

So today . . . I’m faced with thinking through this syllabus so I can reissue in time for pre-registration for Spring 2010. Do I want to do 'Disney and the City' again?

Moreover, there is this matter of a special session at the AAG about filmic urban landscapes. I want to discuss “Cars” and the imaginary of creative destruction as a narrative trope within neoliberal capitalism. That’s what I want to talk about at the AAG.

And yes, it IS urban historical geography.

Soft Green Gales of Creative Destruction

• Creative destruction: getting rid of the old to allow the new to exist; the new holds greater promise than the old

• Gale of creative destruction: Joseph Schumpeter’s idea that creative destruction as undertaken by firms and individuals has the capacity to ‘go viral’ and transform entire industries and economies due to the desire to keep up with the competition

• Soft innovation: New production practices and products that play upon sensory perception, redefine aesthetic appeal, and spark creativity

• Green innovation: New production practices and products that are environmentally friendly and promote environmental sustainability

• Regime change: major ideological shifts in leadership and governance
  

Social media buzzes about creative destruction. Go to Twitter, search for “creative destruction,” read the tweets, and surf to the external content. There, tweeters, bloggers, architects, planners, IT developers, and other soft and green innovators are positively giddy about the prospect that their work could, first, prompt the abandonment of energy inefficient, physically intransigent infrastructures and production techniques, and second, lead to the formation of new ways to attack really pressing problems—like climate change, fossil fuel dependency, unemployment, hunger, inner-city disinvestment, regional decline, and the like.

Some U.S.-based writers, however, temper this exuberance with worries that unless innovators can demonstrate that soft and green will translate into private sector profits, or unless the state takes the lead in getting this form of creative destruction going, then this particular gale is going to be more like a gentle breeze. And, if the U.S. doesn’t step it up and get a wiggle on—particularly in regard to green innovation—it is going to be left behind as a relic.

I have two reactions. Both have been influenced by Carville Earle’s (2003) political economic history of the United States, The American Way: A Geographical History of Crisis and Recovery (Rowman and Littlefield). In this book, Earle presents a “Dialectical Policy Regimes Model.” It specifically links the concept of creative destruction to particular moments in U.S. history.

In short, Earle’s model is based on the idea that the U.S.’s historical development—from the 1780s to the present day—can be thought of as an ongoing cyclical alternation between two policy regimes. One of these, (the democratic) promotes egalitarianism in the domestic sphere and free-trade in the international arena; the other (the republican) promotes elitism in the domestic sphere and protectionism in the international arena. [NB: Earle makes deliberate distinctions b/w democratic regimes, the Democratic party, republican regimes, and the G.O.P. While there is close correspondence between parties and regimes, the correlation is definitely not 1 to 1. Hence the small case ‘d’ and ‘r’ when talking about regimes.]

Separating the regimes are moments of creative destruction that have been kicked into motion by economic and social crisis.

The cycle is as follows:

1. Elitist-protectionist republican regimes take over by instituting processes of creative destruction that involve technological innovations (usually process innovations) that promote capital accumulation (1790s-1830s, 1870s-1920s/30s, 1970s/80s-?).

2. Elitist-protectionist republican regimes tend to end in crises of consumption (e.g. 1830s, 1920s/30s, late 2000s [?]).

3. Egalitarian-free trade democratic regimes take over by instituting processes of creative destruction that entail state formation and the implementation of product innovations and universal social programs that promote wealth redistribution (1840s-1870s, 1930s-1970s/80s, late 2000s [?]).

4. Egalitarian-free trade democratic regimes tend to end in crises of production (1870s, 1970s/1980s, [?]).

5. Return to 1. Every time this happens, there is a redefinition of American statehood and the notion of citizenship. There also occurs expansion in the spatial extent and amount of network integration within the country. The country thus grows geographically from an agglomeration of sectional economies (1790s-1870s), into a functionally interdependent national economy (1870s-1970s), to having controlling nodal status over much of the trans-national global economy (1980s-present).

So, there are three things going on simultaneously with this model: 1) dialectical shifts back and forth between policy regimes, 2) producer or consumer oriented moments of creative destruction, 3) spatial expansion and functional integration of the American economy. Wow.

Tragically, Earle passed away in 2003 shortly after The American Way was published. He did not get to enjoy the positive reception that his book has had from historians, geographers, and political scientists. But even if he had, my guess is that he would have continued for at least the next several years to improve upon the dialectical policy regime model. He says in the book that it is only a beginning step.

Earle also would probably have now been scouring the economic data and legislative dockets for indication as to whether or not the election of Barack Obama signals the beginning of true regime change back toward egalitarian free-trade democracy. It is up to those who read The American Way to ponder that question. Some of my future blog posts will elaborate more on his model, its promise and its many problems. It’s a hard book to read and at times so economically deterministic that it makes me want to bash my head against the wall. But every student (minus one) I’ve read it with (n = about 20) has said afterwards that it changed their perspective on American history, geography, politics, and economy in some way. They’d never really taken cyclical temporality seriously; purely progressive onward-and-upward meta-narratives die really hard.

Back to the tweets. . .

First reaction: after swimming through the social media engagement with creative destruction, thinking about Earle’s take on American political economic history, and experiencing first-hand the Great Recession of 2008-9, I have to agree with many tweeters and bloggers who think that we are in the midst of a gale of creative destruction.

I don’t, however, think this particular moment hinges upon convincing producers about the profitability of green and soft innovations. Instead, if the erosion in consumption that occurred during and after the credit freeze of the Winter of ’08-’09 is any indication, the Great Recession is a crisis of consumption. And according to Earle, the way that the U.S. has gotten itself out of that particular pickle in the past has been to enact policy that will—through state subsidization—develop product innovations and spread the benefits of prior process innovations throughout the population, even if it isn’t profitable at first. If that’s true, then legislators—the ones who control the federal and state purse strings—and traditional media pundits (who right now are so ideologically polarized)—are who we need to be convincing. Thankfully, NGOs, charities and other not-for-profit organizations have primed that pump through work that—although not always intended this way—offers really useful demonstrations for how green and soft innovations might be spread into places that the private sector on its own might otherwise overlook. (Maybe there was some good to come out of the neoliberal moment afterall!)

Second reaction: The U.S. is not going to become one giant relic if state intervention doesn’t happen at the federal level; no matter what, some states and localities are going to make green and soft a priority once the dust settles a bit from the current economic crisis (if they haven’t done so already). Moreover, if the federal government does step in and implements national green and soft strategies, state’s rights and home rule as spelled out under the U.S. Constitution and various U.S. state constitutions are going to ensure that localities will opt into and participate within those strategies in really different ways. Some will be good at it. Others will be really lousy—as demonstrated through the wildly divergent ways in which Medicaid and Medicare services are delivered from county to county. A lot may depend on how much experience a place had during the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s with not-for-profit and privately led green and soft projects. No matter what, the geography of this egalitarian round of creative destruction in the U.S. is still going to be really uneven.

Two questions remain, however: if egalitarian creative destruction requires democratic state intervention, has the Great Recession of 2008-9 been severe enough to force those big wheels into motion? And: what happens in places that miss out on the soft green gale? Will they become so environmentally toxic and politically volatile that their juxtaposition against that of the green and soft world is what will lead to the ‘next big crisis?’