Category Archives: Book Review – Nonfiction

top urban planning books of 2020

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Planetizen has an annual roundup of urban planning books. Certainly urban planners should care about urban planning, but urban planning is not just for urban planners. It touches on topics of interest to engineers, economists, social scientists (separate from economists? discuss amongst yourselves), and generally people who are concerned/interested in people or the environment. Because cities and their suburbs are the environment where the vast majority of people live.

Some animals and plants also live there, and this particular list is notable devoid of any books on parks, trees, urban ecology, or even environmental quality issues like air pollution or water pollution. It has a number of interesting books on housing. Some urban problems like transportation and land use and air quality have a range of solutions that experts loosely agree on, even if politicians and bureaucrats fail to implement them and special interests actively obstruct and spread disinformation about them. Adequate and affordable housing for everyone is the big urban problem that has never been solved and really has no clear cut consensus on what should be done. The basic puzzle is that as a particular city or neighborhood becomes a nice place to live, prices get bid up, and then over time only the relatively affluent can afford to live there. Once the snowball starts rolling, the people who live there will use their political power to try to limit increases in housing supply (for example, resisting greater heights or apartment buildings or smaller lot sizes). Government can try to intervene by allowing/requiring greater density, or it can go the other way and allow automobile-dependent low-density sprawl to develop. The latter chews up land that could be put to better use (or left wild), pollutes our air and water, cooks our planet, and contributes to everything from diabetes to mass pedestrian death to drunk driving. Governments should stop essentially paying people to live in the suburbs, and let people who make this choice experience the true cost to themselves and everyone else on the planet. But that’s just my view and lifestyle choice and I try to be tolerant of others, up to a point. And actually, I occasionally consider retreating to a quiet, cheap suburban life somewhere in the middle states from time to time. But if I did that I would be aware that it was cheap because the government was subsidizing me at others’ expense.

  • Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing
  • Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
  • Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis
  • Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (mortgages and lending, both on the public policy side and private sector side, are part of the puzzle)
  • The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach

There are a few books more about urban and regional planning proper:

  • City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (sounds like a U.S.-centric version of Cities of Tomorrow, a classic and awesome introduction to urban planning history. Even the cover is similar to the version of that book that I have.)
  • The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs
  • Designing for the Mega-region: Meeting Urban Challenges at a New Scale (could we please have high speed rail to connect our mega-regions? Oh, I forgot, this is the United States and we just can’t have nice things.)

Finally, the book that caught my eye most is specifically about pedestrian deaths (Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America), and if you didn’t already notice this is an issue near and dear to my heart. Pedestrian deaths, and motor vehicle-related deaths more broadly, are going to cause coronavirus-level death and carnage each and every year into the foreseeable future, long after the coronavirus shock is in the rear-view mirror. Solutions are known, and would have all kinds of virtuous spillover effects on our urban areas. And yet we fail to understand or act, decade after decade after decade.

Wouldn’t it be fun to just disappear to a mountaintop hermit cabin for a week and read a stack of books on a topic? Well, my idea of fun is not everybody’s idea of fun. Also, I’m not Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, and can’t just leave my family or my day job for a week.

War on the Rocks Holiday Reading List

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I have to be honest with myself – my reading pace has dropped way off during my intensive child-rearing (not to mention full time working) years. I just am not going to be reading long non-fiction books, and I will be chipping away at fiction very slowly, mostly as audiobooks. So that out of the way, there are some interesting books here that I will very likely not be able to read.

  • Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. At first I thought what, is this about military strategy or business strategy or what? Turns out it cuts across many fields and that is why it sounds interesting to me.
  • The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare. I probably won’t read this. In fact, I don’t even want high-tech warfare to arrive, but it will so we might at least want to know it when we see it.
  • George Orwell. I would rather read George Orwell than books about George Orwell, but this reminds that George Orwell wrote a variety of books other than Animal Farm and 1984 (or are you supposed to write out the letters?) I read and enjoyed Burmese Days a few years ago, for example. I would like to reread 1984 though. I don’t usually reread books, but this is a classic I read when I was just too young to appreciate it. The interesting thing to me is that it depicts future governments as mastering propaganda through technology, when in fact technology is causing governments to lose control of communications with their own people.
  • Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan – I am always up for some near-future techno-dystopia!
  • Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Recently I have been trying to stop worrying about the line between science fiction and fantasy and learn to enjoy the latter more. But now we have something called “science fantasy” that straddles the line. I guess we have always had it and now it just has a new (to me) name. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and all that.
  • The Red Trilogy by Linda Nagata. Military science fiction. Not always my favorite genre but I am always on the lookout for something even close to the classics like Starship Troopers, Ender’s Game, and The Forever War. Of course, in all of those war is a means to explore a variety of social and psychological topics.

Katrina, 15 years on

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August 29, 2020 will be the 20-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans. I think it’s a critical event to understand for at least two reasons. First, it was an early, regional example of U.S. governmental failure to prepare, respond, and recover from a known risk. Now we have a crisis unfolding on a much larger scale, and the government is proving to be just as inept as it was in 2005, with far greater consequences. So I think Katrina was an early warning of government dysfunction that we failed to heed.

As far as coronavirus goes, we are past the prepare stage and it is getting late to mount an effective response. We can still recover though. New Orleans didn’t really recover fully, according to this article.

A year after the storm, over half the city’s schools remained shut; under a third of flooded-out residents had returned; and few buses were running in a city where more than a third of African American households did not own cars. By the second anniversary, no further schools had reopened and damaged rental units largely languished unrepaired. And in 2015, the number of children living in poverty, almost 40 per cent – nearly twice the national average – remained unchanged from when the levees broke.

TLS

So Katrina was a cautionary tale of the U.S. government (and I’m talking federal, state, and local) failing to prepare, respond, and recover from a known risk. On a more literal level, it will not be the last coastal American city to be inundated. Eventually they may all be inundated. It is time to learn from what went wrong in Katrina and figure out how to apply it nationally to prepare, respond, and recover from the disasters that are coming.

Doughnut Economics

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Doughnut Economics is a new attempt to communicate the goal of an economy that works for humans while not exceeding the natural limits of the planetary system it is embedded in. You want to be in the dough part. If you are in the hole, you are within planetary boundaries but you are poor, starving, unwell, or otherwise not benefiting from the economy that is working for at least some other people. If you are outside the doughnut entirely, you are outside planetary boundaries and the planetary system will not be able to continue supporting the economic system (including you, and everyone else) indefinitely.

The majority of intelligent and educated people on the planet do not understand these concepts. We need a critical mass of people, certainly leaders and decision makers, to understand the problem before we have much hope of solving it. I support new and novel attempts to communicate these ideas. This one doesn’t quite seem fully coherent to me in terms of stocks and flows, and I think if we taught children about stocks and flows from a young age they would grow up better able to understand systems in terms that aren’t so dumbed down.

More from Less by Andrew McAfee

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More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next is a new(ish) entry in the decoupling/dematerialization debate. The argument is that we (i.e. the United States) are gradually using fewer natural resources and producing less pollution each year while still growing our economy and quality of life.

This is the point in the post where I have to admit I am reviewing a book I haven’t read. I read the description of the book on Amazon, and this review in Foreign Policy. I would imagine that an MIT scientist (the author, Andrew McAfee) would get the math right. I would imagine he probably understands the difference between stocks and flows. But the general public, and even well- but narrowly educated people typically do not. First we have to decrease the rate at which our footprint is growing, which it sounds like this book might make a case that we have. That is good. But our footprint is still too big to sustain our way of life indefinitely, and still growing. Second, we have to start shrinking our footprint. I don’t think we have, and I am not sure this book makes that case. It is still too big to sustain our way of life indefinitely. Third, we have to shrink it to a level that can sustain our way of life indefinitely. We have to complete these three steps in order, and complete them all before it is too late to save our civilization and our planet’s ecosystems in roughly their current state. It’s unfair because I am literally judging the book by its cover, but it sounds like it makes a case that we might have completed only the first step.

The Foreign Policy article argues that it doesn’t even make that compelling case because it ignores trade and external impacts. In other words, the environmental impact of our domestic consumption and economic activities is happening in developing countries, plus the oceans and atmosphere. It’s surprising to me if he made that obvious a mistake, but again, I would have to read the book to find out. It is unlikely my employer and family and need for some minimal amount of physical rest will afford me an opportunity to do that soon. So if you read it, let me know what you find out!

Philadelphia

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As the protests, clashes between police and citizens, looting and arson continue in Philadelphia, I find myself thinking back to On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. A lot of the book is about the relationship between the police and citizens in Philadelphia neighborhoods, and specifically (although place names are thinly disguised in the book) one of the neighborhoods where the tear gas and rubber bullets were flying yesterday.

The story the book tells is one where young men grow up without much prospect of finding a job in the formal economy, and get involved in the informal drug economy as a way to earn an income. In the informal drug economy, there is no recourse to the authorities when someone is robbed or otherwise taken advantage of. There are robberies, assaults, and cycles of escalating revenge that wind up with the vast majority of men in some neighborhoods in jail, probation or parole. Once young men are in jail, they tend to come out harder than they went in, and they are even less likely to break out of the cycle.

To break this cycle, we should follow the evidence of what has been tried and worked, of course. But just using logic and system thinking, the most obvious and quick way to break this cycle would be to legalize drugs. Then there would be no driver for the violence. Legalize, tax, and use the proceeds to fuel substance abuse and mental health programs that have been proven to work. Or just set up a universal health care system that provides these things to all citizens.

Then there is the harder long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own. Childcare, education, health care, unemployment, disability, retirement. The process of building a stable, fair, and democratic society for the long haul would be a hard and long-term project, but other countries have figured out most of it and the United States could learn.

Health Department guys

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“What guys, Officer?” Vic asked.

“Health Department guys,” Joe Bob said.

Vic said, “Oh Jesus, it was cholera. I knowed it was…”

“Then they got on the phone to the Plague Center in Atlanta, and those guys are going to be here this afternoon. But they said in the meantime that the State Health Department was to send some fellas out here and see all the guys that were in the station last night, and the guys that drove the rescue unit to Braintree. I dunno, but it sounds to me like they want you quarantined.”

“Moses in the bullrushes,” Hap said, frightened.

“The Atlanta Plague Center’s federal,” Vic said. “Would they send out a planeload of federal men just for cholera?”

The Stand

Because if the Feds from Atlanta show up in their white suits, you know it is serious. They will do whatever it takes to save the country, even if it means incinerating you and everyone you have been in contact with.

Okay, things don’t turn out so well for the country or most characters in The Stand, but it was not for lack of a rapid and heavy handed government response.

what E.O. Wilson is up to

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What, you haven’t received this month’s issue of The Bitter Southerner yet? An interview with E.O. Wilson finds him 90 years old and only semi-retired, living in Massachussetts.

In 2016, Wilson published Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, in which he claims that if every nation sets aside half its landmass and waters for nature, then we can ensure the continuing existence of 85% of all species on the planet — including ourselves. The book garnered acclaim and criticism, but, like much of Wilson’s work, its central tenets have become more mainstream over time. 

the best scholarly books of the decade

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This is a late entry on the best books of the 2010s, but it included a number of interesting nonfiction books I hadn’t heard of. I don’t have time to sit down and read long non-fiction books these days (or really think in depth about anything at all) so these reviews might be as close as I get. Here are a handful I might read if I actually could.

  • “Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes (Verso, 2018). It is a thrilling and formidable intervention into contemporary discussions of sex work, and settles the debate in favor of full and immediate global decriminalization.” Let’s just go ahead and legalize gambling, drugs, and prostitution, tax them, tamp down the violence and move on.
  • Andrew Friedman’s Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia. “Though the intelligence industry isn’t always visible, one constantly senses its presence. Its rapid growth since the 1950s also created a prosperous, high-tech region whose’s centrality to U.S. foreign policy belies its idyllic self-image.” This is the actual deep state, in its original sense of the military-industrial-intelligence complex that influences so much of our country’s laws and policies to produce wealth and power for itself.
  • The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Okay, I’ve heard of this one. Haven’t read it but think I get the idea. Wanted to be seen reading a copy while on jury duty but didn’t have the guts.
  • Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Because tolerance and understanding is good.
  • Every Twelve Seconds – this is about what really goes on in a slaughterhouse. I admit it, my “meatless Monday” aspirations have slipped during the coronavirus shutdown.
  • James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth (Oxford University Press, 2011) “did more than any single book to shake up how I thought about British imperial history.” What could this have to do with me? Well, I am American and have spent time in Singapore and Australia, among other places.

Delta-v

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I recently read Delta V, a near-future space exploration saga by Daniel Suarez. I recommend it as a really entertaining and thought-provoking book. The story is about an expedition to mine an asteroid for water, metals, and other minerals in the early 2030s. There are no technologies in the book that seem implausible – in fact, I would say if anything that the author was conservative and assumed only technology that would be available today. (I’m writing this in 2020, just in case you are an anthropologist reading this in the impossibly distant future.) The story doesn’t have a villain per se other than “investors”, but there is a character that seems to be some combination of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, a sort of semi-villain with redeeming features. The author obviously did a lot of research on the physics, biology, and even chemistry of life in space, so be warned that while being entertained you might learn something by accident.