In the middle of the Detroit River -- between the Detroit waterfront and the Riverside Drive in Windsor, Ontario -- Belle Isle is a small island beloved by the people of Detroit.
Biking in Chicago (a city I now visit regularly) Image: David Schaper, NPR
As people start to move about a little more -- perhaps too much more -- many of us are doing so differently than we did before. Until a vaccine is found -- and taken widely -- transportation patterns are shifting. In a brief radio piece, Journalist David Schaper explores the shifting patterns that are already noticeable. He then discusses which of these patterns might become permanent, and the degree to which some of the changes fit with long-term goals of city planners.
I will be sharing this story with students in my urban geography and global thinking courses. Those who wish to explore the topic further might also enjoy the free CitiesX course I am taking online at Harvard.
Atlas Obscura is always a trove of geographic insight; the geographically curious can spend hours perusing the online or print version.
A recent contribution by journalist Lauren Vespoli offers even more to the geographically curious (including hints as to how and why we should all be geographically curious). In How to Dig Into the History of Your City, Town, or Neighborhood, she describes how she has used newly-found down time to explore her own surround -- and to engage friends to do the same. This is very creative online bonding! As she makes clear throughout the piece, the history comes in many forms and so do the processes of discovery.
Geographic discovery involves inquiry about
the ordinary in our midst.
She describes several tools that are familiar to me as a professional geographer -- such as Sanborn maps -- and other fascinating tools I had never heard of. I am most excited about using the Archipedia, which has well over 100 listings in each of two cities I teach as honors colloquia -- New Orleans and Detroit. Sadly, none of the fascinating buildings of Brockton (about which I teach an honors seminar) are this database, but I have other resources for exploring that city formerly known as North Bridgewater.
Among the tools Vespoli introduces is another I learned about from a fellow geographer just recently. Mapping Inequality is an impressive online collection of the maps used by the Federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation to guide mortgage rate-setting. In the guise of managing institutional financial risk, these maps also imposed or reinforced geographic patterns of racial discrimination through the practice of redlining. For many communities across the United States, researchers can discover whether their own neighborhoods fell inside or outside of those red lines.
I will also use this in my course Environmental Regulations, because this kind of research -- while enjoyable in its own right -- is potentially quite useful in some of the detailed work necessary to protect us from environmental contamination. Because pollutants from the past can be just as dangerous as chemicals currently in use, searching for possible relict sources of pollution is an excellent application of geographic skills.
As part of the CitiesX course I am taking online, I very much enjoyed this 2018 with Joe Curtatone, the mayor of Somerville, Massachusetts.
I learned some interesting things about a city near Boston I have visited only a few times, and I recommend the discussion for anybody who is trying to imagine improving how their own communities work.
The mayor's approach to leadership is also refreshing -- it involves long-term, deep listening. His discussion with Professor Ed Glaeser is short on details, but he references another talk that provides some more specific examples of how Somerville has succeeded. That talk was easy to find -- city planner George Proakis addressing a TEDx Somerville event in 2014.
Proakis starts with a fascinating primer on the origins of urban zoning in the United States before turning to a discussion of the process Somerville pursued in changing its zoning code that year. Spoiler alert: both talks include a gem that should be obvious, but sadly is not: if we plan our cities for cars, we are going to get cars. We cannot plan for cars and hope for walkability!
Bonus: Proakis mentions Artisans Asylum as an example of an enterprise that would be difficult to categorize under traditional zoning rules. It is the first makerspace I heard of, and traditional zoning struggles with whether to call these education spaces or manufacturing spaces. I learned of Artisans Asylum when my son had an internship there -- in teaching the tenants how to use the equipment, he developed skills that have been very useful to him as an artist.
Lagniappe
One of the ways to tell that Somerville is succeeding is that it has an extraordinary array of coffee shops -- a friend who used to live there has introduced me to a couple of them. I look forward to visiting again after the plague, to see how coffee fits into the Assembly Square area in particular.
My wife Pamela and I famously met in French class, and though her French is much better than mine (because she regularly went to that class and then several more), neither of us speak it well. We did manage to put together enough phrases to navigate a weekend in rural Quebec about a decade ago, and if the current COVID-19 crisis abates in time, we'll brave a couple of days in France while passing between places where we speak the local languages more effectively -- Great Britain (sort of), Spain, and Portugal. Fingers crossed for that.
Meanwhile, I'm intrigued by a nice little story about learning French in order better to enjoy the rich cultural tapestry of the United States itself. The more one knows French, the more they can enjoy the food, music, and people of New Orleans. I know Rosetta Stone as language-learning software, but it also sponsors travel courses and a blog about language learning.
One tag used on the blog is words beyond translation, which points to articles that deeply explore just a few examples of words like ojalá (Spanish) and retrouvailles (French) that are exactly that: words for which the dictionary will provide an English equivalent, but which it is. worth learning the language to understand more fully. The Portuguese word saudades would be another great entry in this series. It can be translated as "longing" or "missing" but means so much more. I explored the word in my newsletter Folha da Frontera during my first visit to Brazil in 1996.
I am teaching honors colloquia about New Orleans this year, specifically because I find the city interesting but have never had a chance to go. Music has been a big part of the class and we have also discussed the importance of education in the French language there. Exploring the Big Easy from afar with my honors students, I am looking forward to our eventual visit. We will brush up on our French before we go, and we will stay at La Belle Esplanade, a tiny hotel whose main purpose is to immerse people in the culture of the "real" New Orleans.
It is time to propose one-credit honors colloquia for next fall, and I was beginning to think that my next topic should be Detroit, with a focus on the role of the arts in the social and economic development of the city. My kid -- an accomplished artist and honorary geographer -- had introduced me to the importance of this question a few years ago, with a brilliant paper in response to the proposed liquidation of some of the city's great museum collections.
The decision was made for me just now, by an instructive review of Detroit's proto-punk scene on PRI's Studio 360. As part of its American Icon series, journalist Pedro Rafael Rosado makes a convincing case for the pivotal importance of the 1962 one-hit wonder 96 Tearsby Question Mark and the Mysterians.
Visual arts will figure just as prominently in our colloquium,
including Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals,
completed thirty years prior to the music featured above.
I teach several courses each year on coffee, but some while ago I offered a one-credit honors colloquium on tea -- more specifically on tea and climate change. I intended to do this just once, but we learned that it was a popular topic, so I have continued to offer it each semester. It has been a great way for me to keep meeting new honors students, whose curiosity and willingness to take intellectual risks is always invigorating.
It has also been a way for me to keep learning about tea, which remains a distant third behind coffee and chocolate in terms of my direct experience. Part of that learning came from the honors program itself, whose key staff person was an accomplished tea collector and hobbyist who would visit our class a couple of times each semester. She is still a consummate tea maven, but has recently moved on to another university.
As a sort of parting gift, she shared the article The Tea Capital of Europe Isn’t Where You Think It Is, recently published in the AFAR travel journal. I knew the answer right away because of her classroom visits -- which included first-hand accounts -- and samples -- from her visits to Azorean tea gardens. But from the article, I learned much more about the origins of tea in the archipelago.
The story reminds me of Sri Lanka -- in both cases, islands facing a blight on a major crop turned to tea.
I will eventually visit Chá Gorreana because of one of my hobbies -- rowing and sailing Azorean whaleboats. Maybe that's two hobbies...
It is sad -- an inexplicable, really -- that the fisherfolk of Louisiana were counting on the current administration to protect fisheries from the ravages of the petroleum industry. One reason we have Federal environmental laws is that state and local politicians so often pursue a regulatory race to the bottom, and few places have found a lower bottom than Louisiana.
Those who depend on the Atchafalaya for their livelihood also depend upon the
Federal government for protection from polluters.
Image: Photojournalist Vaughn Hillyard, NBC News
That leaves the Federal government -- through its Environmental Protection Agency, Army Corps of Engineers, and other branches -- as the best hope for the protection of fisheries against polluters. As I wrote in Eagle and Condor in 2016, politicians of both major parties have been overly friendly to the developers of pipelines. It should come as no surprise that a deeply anti-environment and anti-science administration would offer even less resistance to those who threaten Louisiana's riparian environments.
Lagniappe
This blog includes many references to Louisiana. I will highlight just two relatively recent examples, one bad and one good: Louisiana in Tough Shape and Hot Island Hot Spot.
Geography asks three questions:
