Haiti Tries to Turn the Tide on the Urban Transition

In the wake of last year's devastating earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti is experimenting with de-urbanization--trying to get people out of the city and back into the countryside. At the time of the earthquake the city was home to nearly a third of the country's 10 million people, but as the Associated Press story about this notes, you have to understand why Port-au-Prince was so crowded in order to appreciate why this might just work.

Part of the reason was that Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, the late dictator, shut down ports and tore up roads to undermine his opponents in the countryside. And in the 1980s, new factories lured farmers to the city from fields where they were struggling to survive.

When the magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck on Jan. 12, 2010, some 300,000 people died, according to government figures. Densely packed neighborhoods became death traps. Whole neighborhoods were flattened. Many in Haiti have speculated that the death toll would have been lower had there been jobs and basic services in the countryside to keep people there.

Urbanization is a Major Source of Environmental Degradation

An important new study has just been published in the academic journal PLoS One summarizing our knowledge of what growing urban populations mean for the environment. The authors--Karen Seto, Michail Fragkias, Burag Guneralp, and Michael Reilly--drew the following major conclusions:

The conversion of Earth's land surface to urban uses is one of the most irreversible human impacts on the global biosphere. It drives the loss of farmland, affects local climate, fragments habitats, and threatens biodiversity. Here we present a meta-analysis of 326 studies that have used remotely sensed images to map urban land conversion. We report a worldwide observed increase in urban land area of 58,000 km² from 1970 to 2000. India, China, and Africa have experienced the highest rates of urban land expansion, and the largest change in total urban extent has occurred in North America. Across all regions and for all three decades, urban land expansion rates are higher than or equal to urban population growth rates, suggesting that urban growth is becoming more expansive than compact. 

Gentrification and Diversity in American Cities

Gentrification has been underway in richer cities of the world for decades, but the 2010 Census in the US has revealed that it is an important part of increasing the residential diversity of cities. The latest story comes from New York, where the NY Times reports on the transformation of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in NYC's Borough of Brooklyn "that traces its African-American roots to the early 19th century and has been the borough’s black cultural capital for decades."

Overshadowed by Harlem’s racial metamorphosis since 2000, an even more striking evolution has occurred in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Over all, the neighborhood is now barely 60 percent black — down from 75 percent a decade ago. But in the older Bedford section west of Throop Avenue, according to the 2010 census, blacks have recently become a minority of the population for the first time in 50 years.

“Both the fall of the crime rate and the improvement of the subway were conditions that made this neighborhood more attractive to people who might not have considered living there in the past,” said John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

“In the 2010 census, the first thing we noticed was how the concentrations in many traditional black and white areas dropped off across so many blocks,” said Steven Romalewski, director of the mapping service of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY’s Graduate Center, which analyzed the census results block by block.

Small Town America is Nearly a Thing of the Past

Reporters have continued to mine the recent Population Reference Bureau report summarizing findings from the 2010 Census, and have discovered that rural America is on the verge of disappearing.

The latest 2010 census numbers hint at an emerging America where, by midcentury, city boundaries become indistinct and rural areas grow ever less relevant. Many communities could shrink to virtual ghost towns as they shutter businesses and close down schools, demographers say.

More metro areas are booming into sprawling megalopolises. Barring fresh investment that could bring jobs, however, large swaths of the Great Plains and Appalachia, along with parts of Arkansas, Mississippi and North Texas, could face significant population declines.

A key element in all of this has been the decline of mining and timber industries that created jobs in rural areas in the past but no longer do so. Farming is a now a big business, so there are relatively few farm families any more. Furthermore, almost everyone has access to the same TV and internet as everyone else, so rural areas are not socially isolated in the way that they once were.

The Dangers of Demographic Deception

I have already commented on the tendency of cities to think that they have been under-counted by the census--although there is never a complaint about over-counting. Mark VanLandingham, a demographer at Tulane University, has a very good Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times pointing out the dangers of over-estimating the population. 

Such overestimates have been especially problematic for New Orleans. According to the original census estimates for 2007, the city’s population stood at 239,124, which independent sources, like voter turnout and death records, indicate was a reasonable guess. But after heavy lobbying from then-Mayor Ray Nagin’s office — claiming the bureau’s methods missed large numbers of poor residents — the number was revised upward by about 20 percent, to 288,113.

A similarly successful challenge to the 2008 initial estimate led to yet another substantial uptick; combined, these revised estimates put the city on pace to recover almost all the residents it had lost after Hurricane Katrina within a few years.

South Suburbs of Chicago Grow as Blacks Leave the Loop

The New York Times today followed up on a story that I commented on several months ago as the first data from the 2010 Census were being released--the City of Chicago has been shrinking because the black population has been heading to the suburbs. More specifically, the southern suburbs of Chicago.

One path that so many black middle-class home buyers have followed from Chicago’s South Side in recent years ends just off Lincoln Highway, past the entrance to the Newbury Estates subdivision in Matteson.

The subdivision, about 30 miles from the Loop, represents only part of a much greater migration to the south suburbs from 2000 to 2010. In all, Chicago’s black population declined by about 181,000 people, or 17 percent, in that period, according to recently released figures from the 2010 census. The rapid contraction of the black population was the main driver of the city’s overall population loss of about 200,000 in the last decade, a fact noted by Rahm Emanuel in his mayoral inauguration speech in May.

Midnight Train to Georgia

I have commented before about the reversal of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South to the North, but the New York Times has just added a wrinkle to the story--a disproportionate share of those moving back to the South are from New York.

About 17 percent of the African-Americans who moved to the South from other states in the past decade came from New York, far more than from any other state, according to census data. Of the 44,474 who left New York State in 2009, more than half, or 22,508, went to the South, according to a study conducted by the sociology department of Queens College for The New York Times.

The movement is not limited to New York. The percentage of blacks leaving big cities in the East and in the Midwest and heading to the South is now at the highest levels in decades, demographers say.

Spencer Crew, a history professor at George Mason University who was the curator of a prominent exhibit on the Great Migration at the Smithsonian Institution, said the current exodus from New York stemmed largely from tough economic times. New York is increasingly unaffordable, and blacks see more opportunities in the South.

New Orleans Has Become More Racially Segregated Since Katrina

Geographer Richard Campanella of Tulane University has been analyzing demographic changes in New Orleans since Katrina and the surprising finding is that the city is now more residentially segregated by race than it was before the devastating flooding.

"Paradoxically, while much of greater Gentilly and eastern New Orleans lost large numbers of African-Americans in absolute numbers, they simultaneously became more African-American in a relative sense because the few whites who lived in those areas departed in even greater numbers than their black neighbors," Campanella, the author of six books about the city's landscape, noted in a summary of his findings.

Meanwhile, neighborhoods stretching from the Riverbend to Uptown and into Treme and St. Roch saw a parallel increase in the proportion of white residents, a change that reflects historic trends, Campanella wrote.

Is Detroit Disappearing?

The census data for the state of Michigan were released yesterday, and the population decline in Detroit was clearly the biggest headline produced by those data. The New York Times noted that:

Detroit’s population had plunged by 25 percent over the last decade. It was dramatic testimony to the crumbling industrial base of the Midwest, black flight to the suburbs and the tenuous future of what was once a thriving metropolis.

It was the largest percentage drop in history for any American city with more than 100,000 residents, apart from the unique situation of New Orleans, where the population dropped by 29 percent after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College.

Population Control in China

Tomorrow (22 February) the Population Reference Bureau will hold an on-line discussion on the topic of whether or not China is likely to loosen its one-child policy. The Economist this past week reported on a different kind of population control taking place in China, which I discuss in Chapter 9--the limitation of people coming into cities. In particular, the government seems very concerned about the rapid growth of Beijing and is clamping down on people migrating from rural places and living in "informal" places such as underground air-raid shelters.

Rarely since the 1980s, when China’s strict controls on migration from countryside to town began to break down, has the capital appeared so determined to reverse the tide. A key event was an investigation last summer which found that Beijing’s population (those living in the city for six months or longer) had topped 19.7m by the end of 2009. This was 2m more than official figures had suggested. In a development plan published seven years ago, the government had aimed not even to reach 18m before 2020. The figures are a bit misleading, because Beijing municipality covers an area half Belgium’s size, with far-flung satellite towns and a rural expanse. But even the city proper has grown to more than 10m, from 8.5m a decade ago.

Is Chicago Really Shrinking?

A headline in today's New York Times says that "Chicago is now smaller and less black, census shows." That is technically true if we are talking about the City of Chicago, and that obviously matters to the mayor and other elected officials. But if we step back from local politics, we see that the Chicago metro area is not shrinking, nor becoming less black. The real story here is not shrinkage in Chicago, but rather that Americans continue to prefer the suburbs.

While Chicago remains the nation’s third-most-populous city — with 2.69 million people — it lost more than 200,000 residents during the last decade, Census Bureau figures released Tuesday show.

That is about a 7 percent decrease, a sharper drop than some leaders had expected and gloomy news for the city’s budget writers (who have to worry about the tax base) and elected officials (who have to worry about who will bear the political brunt of redistricting).

The decline among blacks may be explained in part by migration to the suburbs, the demolition of thousands of high-rise public housing units and a broader population shift to the South.

Even as the city shrank, a ring of suburbs along its fringes expanded rapidly. In fact, two of those counties — Will and Kendall — will probably rank among the fastest-growing counties in the nation over the last decade, said Kenneth M. Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

More Results from the Newest ACS Data Release

People are having a lot of fun with the latest release of American Community Survey data, which represent our first look at census tract level data since the release of the 2000 census data. These data are coming to us well ahead of when we would have had such information had the census clung to the old long form instead of pushing ahead with the ACS. The New York Times leads with the story of the suburbanization of minority groups in the US, which factors into the potential for diminished levels of residential segregation. On that score, the NYT notes that William Frey's assessment of residential segregation from these data is not entirely in line with the analysis of John Logan at Brown University, who used data from a slightly different scale to conclude that there has been no real change in patterns of residential segregation. We will hear more about that as time goes on, I'm sure.

Census Tract Level Data Now Available from American Community Survey

The US Census Bureau today released the first set of data from the American Community Survey that go down to the census tract level of geography. This was done by combining the respondents from the 2005 through the 2009 surveys. We are now getting very close to the promised equivalent to the long form on previous censuses, which has now been replaced by the ACS. Demographer William Frey at the Brookings Institution jumped quickly on this goldmine to evaluate levels of residential segregation by race in US metro areas.

America's neighborhoods took large strides toward racial integration in the last decade as blacks and whites chose to live near each other at the highest levels in a century.

Revolution of Rising Expectations in China

China is famous for having a large and cheap unskilled labor force, and for exporting a lot of excellent students abroad for graduate education. For the last decade, however, the country has been educating a new generation of college students with the expectation that they would populate a new middle class of white collar workers in China. The results seem to be disappointing, at least so far, according to a story in the New York Times.

The economy, despite its robust growth, does not generate enough good professional jobs to absorb the influx of highly educated young adults. And many of them bear the inflated expectations of their parents, who emptied their bank accounts to buy them the good life that a higher education is presumed to guarantee.

“College essentially provided them with nothing,” said Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China’s education system. “For many young graduates, it’s all about survival. If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability.”

Urbanization Takes a Break in China

The future of China, as for the rest of the world, is an urban one. China has been building cities at a booming pace, catching up with the rest of world in terms of its level of urbanization relative to its level of development. The world-wide recession, however, has produced a hiatus in some of that growth, creating at least for moment the appearance of ghost towns in China, as evidenced by this report from NPR's "Here and Now."

Metropolitan America Interactive Map

The Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution has just updated its interactive "State of Metropolitan America Indicator Map" with 2009 American Community Survey data. It is a great tool for exploring the demographics of America's biggest urban areas. Check it out.

Mobile Phones Outnumber Toilets in Developing Countries

President Obama has just completed a trip to India, one purpose of which was to shore up opportunities for US businesses to expand in a way that would benefit US workers. Organizations doing business in India are most apt to interact with the well-educated, English-speaking middle and upper classes, but it is important to remember that there is a huge underclass in India--an enormous (and still rapidly growing) segment of the population that lives on only a few dollars a day. As in much of the developing world, their scope in life is enhanced a bit by the now ubiquitous mobile phone, and ahead of the President's visit to India, it was reported that there are more cell phones in India than there are toilets. Data from UN-Habitat suggest that this is probably true in every developing country. Communication is an important part of modern life, but people also need public health and education (both of which require huge investments in infrastructure) if their lives are to materially improve. Mobile phones get around some of the infrastructure requirements of land lines, just as bottled or other packaged water gets clean drinking water into the hands of people without a huge water piping project. But that should not lull us into believing that all infrastructure problems are readily solved in this way.  

Life in the Slow Lane

Baby boomers in the United States (and in Canada and Western Europe as well) represent not only a disproportionate fraction of the population, but an increasingly large fraction of all drivers. A symposium at the National Transportation Safety Board this week was treated to the news that 15 years from now, one in five of all licensed drivers in the United States will be age 65 or older. This is related not simply to aging, but also to the fact that the boomers are growing older mainly in the suburbs and exurbs, where there is very little in the way of public transportation. This essentially forces people to keep driving as they get older, because they have few other options.

What Do We Mean by Urban Sustainability?

Everyone wants and, indeed, loves to talk about sustainability, but it is a maddeningly difficult concept to nail down. This seemed to be the overall conclusion of a new National Research Council report on "Pathways to Urban Sustainability: Research and Development on Urban Systems." 

Workshop participants did not set out to uncover a precise definition of a sustainable city. Rather, their discussions emphasized the fluid nature of urban sustainability both as an intellectual concept and a strategic building block for policies designed to improve living and working conditions―for today's citizens and future generations. It was this sense of how difficult it is to make sense of urban parameters in the metropolitan expanses of 21st century America that both guided and constrained conversations at the workshop.

Do You Live in a Global City?

In "honor" of the fact that more than half of the world's population now lives in urban areas, Foreign Policy has linked up with management consulting firm A.T. Kearney, and The Chicago Council on Global Affairs to create a ranking of what they call global cities. The concept of global cities was first laid out by Saskia Sassen of Columbia University:

Foreign Policy: What distinguishes a global city?

Saskia Sassen: A global city makes new norms. And two requirements for that happening are complexity and diversity. Quite often, in countries around the world, it's the most global city, especially New York, where new national and international norms are made.

FP: Is a global city always a megacity, and vice versa?

SS: I'm so glad you asked. Most global cities are really not megacities. Some are, but the question of size is a tricky one. Size is important for a global city because you need enormous diversity in very specialized sectors, a whole range of them. Some of the leading global cities are very large, like Tokyo or Shanghai. On the other hand, you have cities that are simply very large, like Mumbai or Sao Paulo. I don't think Lagos is a global city; it's just a huge city. You have a lot of very large cities that are not necessarily global cities.