OK folks, I know this is a low blow, but this is the truth about America’s fantasy with war. I just returned from Oklahoma and this is my image editorial based on what I saw with my own eyes.

Fantasy (a real license plate now being issued):

vs.

Reality (nuff said!):

I’m attracted to the idea that civilizations are organisms that metabolize. I first came across this idea when reading a book about the history of the Anasazi, a sophisticated and complex society in the Southwestern desert region of the United States that collapsed suddenly. The book’s author suggested that the more centralized a society becomes, the more vulnerable it is to a sudden downfall because its metabolism increases beyond its ability to consume. i.e. the bigger you get, the more food you eat. The article below suggests that cities are indeed like biological organisms but behave differently. As they increase in size, rather than slowdown as an animal would, it consumes at an alarmingly higher rate. The study also argues that cities have a way of re-organzing themselves to adjust. In other words, cities are self-organzing, intelligent systems.
Scientists Discover Why Life Is Faster in Big Cities:

The researchers showed that city growth driven by wealth creation increases at a rate that is faster than exponential; the only way to avoid collapse as a population outstrips the finite resources available to it is through constant cycles of innovation. These effectively re-engineer the initial conditions of growth. But the greater the absolute population, the smaller the relative return on each such investment – new ideas must come ever faster. Thus, the bigger the city, the faster life is; but the rate at which life gets faster must itself accelerate to maintain the city as a growing concern so much so that to maintain growth, major innovations must now occur on time-scales that are significantly shorter than a human lifespan.

Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling on future cities. Here he surveys contemporary Belgrade, but demonstrates how the present future composts the past. What he writes is very similar to what I see in Rome. Life goes on, cities mutate, people adapt and change their environments.

(Via BoingBoing)

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The Global Urban Real Estate Boom – Newsweek: International Editions – MSNBC.com:

From San Francisco and Seattle to Moscow and Shanghai, prices for prime residential property are surging, even as overall national numbers in some markets continue to be depressed amid worries of global recession and a real-estate bubble. The triumph of the glamour cities turns conventional wisdom on its head—for quite a while, experts including Yale’s Robert Shiller have been predicting that these cities, having been hyped the most, would likely fall farthest, fastest. The decoupling of national and local real-estate trends, which were once much more closely linked, reflects the lives of the new “superprime” property buyers themselves, roughly 50 percent of whom are expatriates, according to the global-property research firm Jones Lang LaSalle. While globalization has allowed money, but not necessarily people, to roam the world more freely, Cañas and his colleagues are an exception—they float on a cushion of international capital, largely immune to regional concerns, and are flush with cash.

I found this article fascinating because when I lived in New York I saw on the ground exactly this phenomenon. As rents and property values grew, the amount of money being made by my friends and colleagues was going down. There was a “Disneylandificiation” going on in Manhattan, and I noticed the same thing in LA, San Francisco and Seattle. I knew locals weren’t driving the economy. So what gives?

I feel we are seeing the manifestation of what McLuhan described when he said all the megalopolises of the world were now connected by air travel which are now like sky subways. It is one continuous metropolis, networked by the global financial elites. Who are they? I’m not sure, but the article describes many coming from finance and insurance, maybe entertainment too. I’m now wondering if cities will also be a bit like walled city states with airports serving as the equivelent of castle gateways of medieval times. Only those with passports and papers and the means to travel by air will have access to these playgrounds. As for the service sector, they will continue to be illegals and a growing undereducated underclass. This is only one scenario, though, and I hope workers, artists and people who traditionally innovate continue to find their niches in beautiful and safe places.

Photo by David Burnett, National Geographic

Yet another dispatch from the sci-fi front, this time brought to us by none other than Disney and Co.:

Disney World, Orlando Beyond Disney – National Geographic Magazine:

The Theme-Parking, Megachurching, Franchising, Exurbing, McMansioning of America: How Walt Disney Changed Everything

Everything happening to America today is happening here, and it’s far removed from the cookie-cutter suburbanization of life a generation ago. The Orlando region has become Exhibit A for the ascendant power of our cities’ exurbs: blobby coalescences of look-alike, overnight, amoeba-like concentrations of population far from city centers. These huge, sprawling communities are where more and more Americans choose to be, the place where job growth is fastest, home building is briskest, and malls and megachurches are multiplying as newcomers keep on coming. Who are all these people? They’re you, they’re me, and increasingly, they are nothing like the blue-eyed “Dick and Jane” of mythical suburban America.

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