Cities Are Good For You - Leo Hollis

Cities Are Good For You - The Genius of the Metropolis

Not sure that this book lives up to its name.  In the beginning, from a historical perspective Hollis makes his point - cities are what drove the innovation and change starting with the Renaissance and moving up to modern times.  As he wanders through his other chapters though, it's not clear even from his own narrative that cities are still proving good for us.  In chapters looking at some of the modern metropolises, mostly located in the developing world, despite his positive spin,  some of the problems with infrastructure, services, pollution, overcrowding, social and economic exclusion,  and transportation start to look pretty overwhelming and not particularly good for you or anyone else.  It's not clear that we can actually get the better of many of these problems.

His chapter on Dharavi, the large slum in Mumbai, is interesting.  Some of the people he interviews suggest the problem is not the slum itself, but the fact that it doesn't conform to western notions of what a city is.  Interesting point.  The other perspective is to see the slum as the place where the growing problems of large metropolises have already fully manifested themselves.  I suppose you could redefine "slum" to make it a more positive or differentiated concept but if this is the future of the redefined city, I'm not sure it's one I'm interested in, or that I would define as "good for you."

The other topic Hollis seems to avoid is the effect of global corporate culture on cities and their decline. Where global corporate culture appears is in his discussion of Dharavi and the fact that it is wedged between a modern international airport and a new global corporate business development.  He does make the point that the corporate citizens can come in and out of Mumbai without ever having contact with the Dharavi India, but he doesn't explore the link between those two universes and how the one feeds of the other.  Another place he mentions corporate culture is in the Korean free trade zone developed on an island off their cost, a planned community built by and for large global corporations - his only critique is that he's not sure if this top down model of city design will really make people happy.

He does have some interesting sources to follow up on though:

Geoffrey West - complexity theory and its relation to cities
William H. Whyte - The Organization Man - the rise of corporate culture from the 50s on
                              - The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
                              - City:  Rediscovering the Centre
Robert Putnam - Bowling Alone
Henri Lefebvre - Existentialism (a philosopher who gave it up to become a cabby, but still wrote books)
                         - La Droit de la ville
Jane Jacobs - Dark Ages Ahead

The Great Degeneration - Niall Ferguson

This is an interesting read on several different levels.
Ferguson raises a number of interesting points about the west's current difficulties and changes in society and culture over the past 30 or 40 years.  He references a number of other important thinkers - Krugman, Stiglitz.  He brings up some important current ideas - rent-seeking, lack of democratic participation, the erosion of civil society and the public space, deregulation/bad regulation in the banking sector, lack of punishment or consequences for the fraudsters responsible for the banking collapse of 2007 - and has intelligent things to say about them.

In the first chapter, he looks at the emergence of rule of law and property rights as the basis for the successful development of western european leaders over the past 300 years.

The central thesis of his book is the decline of western economic leadership due to an erosion of these basic rules (rule of law, property rights) in the most recent decades.  He may have a point but somehow the whole book comes off as just a bit too glib.  When you finish the book, you come out thinking the US is well on its way in a slide to 3rd world status, based on the statistics he sights.  One study he relies heavily on is the World Economic Forums annual report on doing business in countries around the world, so it is worth a side trip to check out this study.

When you look at this WEF study, the US does in fact fair middlingly in many areas evaluated, and poorly in some others, BUT it still retains its overall place of 5th in the whole scheme of things, which does not make it a country or economy in crisis.  Turns out Ferguson cherry picks his stats, possibly to develop his attention-getting theses - he's a bit of a media player, turns out.

It's also worth checking him out on the web.  Turns out he was involved in a dispute with Krugman regarding the US post crisis monetary policy - the subsequent events have proved him wrong on all counts.  He also gave a controversial speech criticizing Obama, heavily analyzed but several columnists and big papers - turns out much of his supporting evidence for the critique was partial truth, cherry-picked bits of studies, misrepresented conclusions and outright fabrication.  This speech also sounds a lot like the work of an apologist for big business and the Republican party - which there are whiffs of in his book, The Great Degeneration, without actually coming out and making it obvious.

Ferguson would be an interesting study to look at how an academic can trade on his credentials in support of a particular ideology.  How facts and statistics can be bent and manipulated in support of an ideology (which would seem to be the opposite of the role of academics.)

*The one idea Ferguson brings up that I consider worth looking at is the idea that many of our social institutions  (education, health, politics etc.) have lost the focus of providing a public service and have become largely focused on catering to the needs of the people working within the institution, rather than the needs of the groups the service focuses on.  I have certainly seen this in the education field...

Other Colours: Essays and a Story - Orhan Pamuk

A collection of short essays on a wide variety of topics - his own work, writing as an act, musings on moments in his life, other writers and books, politics, modern culture.  An interesting book to flip through - he is a thoughtful and intelligent man.

Valencia 1952 - Robert Frank

An interesting collection of work from 1952.  Preceded his work for The Americans by three years.  You can already see his approach to photography, his sense of image, quite well-developed in this book.  Definitely a precursor to his more famous collection.  The Americans is more complex, but then the society and country were bigger and more complex too.

Photography After Frank - Philip Gefter

Didn't read the essays, just looked at the pictures.  What I found interesting is how the photographers in this collection generally seem to have focused on one aspect of the innovations that Frank brought to photography.  Some work with his more formal aspects relating to composition, placing of subjects, tonalities.  Some focus on his people as subjects, the slightly off-centre collection of people with an edge of the grotesque.  Some work with his landscape sense, the everyday, the small, the anti-monumental of people's lives and the landscape of americana.  Some focus on the slightly mysterious candid shot of people going about some private social activity, the candid moment, again slightly grotesque.  It isn't until I see all these different threads spread out amongst different photographers and their work that I realize how complex Frank's book, The Americans, really is.

Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

Apparently a forgotten rising star from the 50s early 60s.  Highly regarded by other american authors of the time, like Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes.  Again, somewhat in that american gothic tradition somehow - a certain element of darkness, of monstrous, of rot beneath a facade of elegance.  Having flipped through this very thick book and read a random selection of short stories, there are certain themes that seem to recur:  the vacuous life of the 50s housewife in isolated small town or suburban universes; fallen and depraved wealth.  Many, if not most, of the stories feature women as main characters and explore the subtle feelers of communication between women in world with men on the margin.  Not as dark as James Saunders but perhaps it is a question of different eras.  I suppose in the world of 'Leave it to Beaver" these stories would seem dark enough.

Occupy the Economy - Richard Wolff

A collection of interviews with David Barsamian.  You get a good sense of the thinking of Wolff around democratic and economic issues from the interviews, and in a language that is very readable.  The unfortunate thing is that it is framed around the Occupy movement, which makes the book seem a bit dated.  There is a very short "Manifesto for Economic Democracy and Ecological Sanity" at the end of the book.  This is an excellent guide to Wolff's ideas around alternatives to the current capitalist system.  It is a good starting point for further reading, including his  Facebook page at Economic Democracy Manifesto.