best urban planning books of 2019

Planetizen blog puts this out every year. Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • Better Buses, Better Cities. I ride buses a lot. I wouldn’t mind knowing more about best practices in running a bus authority. I would miss them if they went away in my city, but I also know they could be a lot better. I’m talking to you, Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.
  • Cities, the First 6,000 Years. It sounds like this book goes into ancient cities and how they functioned on the ground.
  • Choked: Life and Death in the Age of Air Pollution. Because it’s possible that if we tackled only one environmental issue in cities, this should be it. Solving air pollution would be a huge gain for public health in itself and would force us to make progress on a lot of other problems.
  • Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life. Because the pictures look really cool, and coming back from a European city and telling your friends in words how much better it is than our cities just doesn’t cut it. They just need to go there. But a book with really cool cartoons of European cities might be an affordable start.
  • Vancouverism. It’s about Vancouver. Actually, I don’t know that I am likely to read this. But I have heard good things, have never been, and would like to go. I’ve also heard that housing prices are a problem there. But I’m going to state the inconvenient truth: most U.S. cities are not that great. Cities that are great are in very short supply, and thus the wealthy bid up prices there until only they are able to live there. So let’s build more cities that are at least good.

November 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • The Darling, a major river system in Australia, has essentially dried up.
Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

modern monetary theory

This might be the clearest explanation of modern monetary theory for the layman (like me) that I have seen so far. This is specifically in a developing country context.

Kaboub is an advocate of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), an approach that views states as the source of money creation through the issuing of currency, and taxation as the destruction of that money supply. In this formulation, states do not use taxes to fund policies but rather create funding through issuing currencies, while taxation is used to curb inflation or disincentivize social practices that are seen as harmful, such as pollution or extreme inequality. MMT has grown increasingly popular among left-leaning politicians in North America and Western Europe, and is beginning to make its way into African political discourse as well.

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

Money is a store of value and a means of exchange, I learned in my one or two lectures on the subject in the 1990s. I’ve always wondered if you could separate the two by having one form of money that has an expiration date and one that does not. Of course you can – think of coupons or frequent flyer miles. If you need to stimulate the domestic economy, you can use the one with the expiration date. You would use the other in international trade, for retirement savings, etc. You would have to decide if you would let people pay taxes in the temporary currency. Businesses would have to decide if they are willing to accept the temporary currency, unless you forced them. An exchange rate would probably develop between the two forms of currency, unless you outlawed that. Prices and exchange rates could be volatile. New mutant forms of debt and derivatives would probably arise. Foreigners and corporations would speculate and manipulate unless you tried to stop them. Come to think of it, maybe there is a reason currency is the way it is and the status quo is hard to change.

“climate emergency” and “global heating”

The Oxford Dictionary has announced that “climate emergency” is the word of 2019. “Global heating” was a close runner up. They also explain why each of these can be considered “a word”.

Such multipart constructions, like “heart attack”, “man-of-war” or the 2017 American Dialect Society word of the year “fake news”, are commonly accepted by linguists as words.

Oxford Dictionaries

more on fully automated luxury communism

Here is the Amazon review of the actual book:

In the twenty-first century, new technologies should liberate us from work. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness—for everyone. Technological advance will reduce the value of commodities—food, healthcare and housing—towards zero.

Improvements in renewable energies will make fossil fuels a thing of the past. Asteroids will be mined for essential minerals. Genetic editing and synthetic biology will prolong life, virtually eliminate disease and provide meat without animals. New horizons beckon.

In Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani conjures a vision of extraordinary hope, showing how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology, and establish meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society merely heralds the real beginning of history.

Amazon

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

This is an idea where computers manage the economy perfectly so we can all live lives of leisure.

The most ardent advocate for FALC, Aaron Bastani, a London-based media executive and writer, has written a new book on the topic. In it, he advances a curious, passionate argument, with a dire assessment of the present and a messianic vision for the future. Bastani believes that we are already living through a potentially epochal transformation of the economy, as epochal as the establishment of agriculture and the introduction of engines and electricity. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced computing might be about to eliminate the need for human labor in no small part, Bastani claims.

The Atlantic

This article doesn’t quite tell you what it is. Without reading the book, I imagine the idea might be that you invest in the right technologies to grow the economy while minimizing ecological harm, then reinvest some of the gains in an optimal way while paying an equitable dividend to everyone in the world. Maybe at some point, you work things out so that money is no longer necessary to keep the system in balance. That’s my guess as to what is in this book – maybe I should read the book and find out.

the latest on fusion power

According to the Washington Post, there are looming breakthroughs in fusion.

But the technical challenges of essentially creating an artificial mini-star have been daunting. Scientists have made fusion happen with various approaches, but more energy was expended in those experiments than was released. The turning point will come when more energy is produced than goes in.

The roadblocks have started to fall away in recent years, thanks to the use of supercomputers to model and optimize the design of fusion systems, and to a new generation of superconductors that increase the magnetic fields that contain the artificial star, thereby dramatically decreasing the required size of fusion devices. Advanced manufacturing techniques for specialized fusion materials have also been developed.

Washington Post

The title of the article is “The fusion energy dream is inching toward planet-saving reality”. Would this “save the planet”. Well, if it were clean, cheap, and safe, it could move us closer to that world of abundance some envision. The problem with fission has been that the infrastructure required to make it safe has been so big, complicated, and costly, that by the time it can be put into place it is already obsolete by a decade or more. And then there is the weaponization problem which has prevented widespread use in poor countries.

Let’s assume it will be clean, cheap, and safe. It could solve our carbon emission problems, air pollution problems, and generally free up a lot of resources for other things, making us quite a bit richer. Whole industries would be created and destroyed, which we could expect to cause some political and financial turmoil. It wouldn’t solve our land use, biodiversity, or water pollution problems.

let the twenteen retrospectives begin!

Here we are a month and a half from the end of the decade, so I assume we are in for a tidal wave of not just 2019 retrospectives but 2010-2019 retrospectives. I am not too hopeful that we will ever pick a name for this decade, considering we have not even agreed on a name for the last one (I vote for the British entry, “the naughties”.) But anyway, “twenteens” is my humble proposal.

The first retrospective I have come across is from the podcast BackStory. This is a podcast where academic historians discuss current events, which I think is neat even though they sometimes try to make everything about race and gender when not everything is about race and gender. Anyway, I thought they might review some of the major geopolitical events of the decade, compare them to major geopolitical events of the past, and speculate on how we might view them in the future. But what they came up with was…social media. Well yeah, I guess the internet and our interactions with information and communication did continue to evolve in the past decade. I think one thing we have seen over the past decade is the democratization of propaganda – now anybody can try to confuse and misinform us, not just big governments and corporations.

Anyway, after I felt a little underwhelmed by that, I found myself needing to make a list of major geopolitical events and trends from the decade. Here is what I came up with.

  • Evidence of accelerating ecological collapse, and some halting steps to do something about it. The Paris climate accord, followed by the US. backing out of the Paris climate accord. When we look back in a few decades, the Paris accord could be seen as a turning point where the world started to come together and address a problem. Maybe we look back and see that we built on these first steps and ultimately succeeded, or maybe we look back on this as the only time we tried, and ultimately failed. Of course, global warming and sea level rise are not the only ecological issues we face. The most shocking stories I have read recently are about the sheer magnitude of the losses in natural habitats and animals, from insects to birds to mammals. A big chunk of what the planet had has vanished in a matter of decades, and the trend is snowballing.
  • Events in the greater Middle East. The initial hope of the “Arab Spring” followed by the grind of brutal and ongoing conflicts across the region, including the Syrian civil war and Yemen and U.S. military involvement across the entire region from Africa to Afghanistan. The Osama bin Laden assassination. The U.S. nuclear deal with Iran, followed by the U.S. backing out of the U.S. nuclear deal with Iran. The Iran-Russia axis vs. the U.S.-Israel-Saudi Arabia-UAE(-Pakistan?) axis. The weird Saudi Arabia-Qatar spat. The fraying of the U.S.-Turkey alliance. Renewed protests in Iraq and elsewhere at the end of the decade.
  • Nuclear proliferation and rearmament. The U.S. and Russia abandoning decades of treaties and gradual progress toward risk reduction. The never-ending Iran-Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan-India sagas.
  • Evaporation of the UN and international cooperation in general. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 1991, it went to the UN security council and got approval to march across the borders of a sovereign UN member state. I naively thought that would be the new normal in post-Cold War conflicts. In the past decade, that has completely gone away with little or no consequences. The U.S. and Russia are in Syria, a sovereign UN member state, with no consequences. Russia is in Ukraine, a sovereign UN member state, with no consequences. So being a sovereign UN member state seems to offer no protection against invasion by a more powerful neighbor, and powerful countries don’t feel the need to consult the UN before invading a neighbor. It seems to me that this is a huge change in international norms over the past decade that could really raise the risk of a major war in the future. (By the way, Bernie Sanders is the only U.S. presidential candidate I have heard even mention reengaging with the UN.)
  • A decade without a world war, nuclear war, global pandemic, famine, or severe economic depression. Because we shouldn’t take any of this for granted, and hey I wanted to end on a high note.

carbon sequestration potential of restoring degraded land

The UN Convention to Combat Desertification says there is a large and potentially very cost-effective opportunity to sequester a lot of carbon by restoring degraded farmland. This is not planting trees or trying to green areas that were historically desert, but trying to restore areas that used to be productive cropland or grazing land to their original condition or better. It’s also an opportunity to expand food production without displacing productive natural ecosystems.

Rene Castro Salazar, an assistant director general at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, said that of the 2 billion hectares (almost 5 billion acres) of land around the world that has been degraded by misuse, overgrazing, deforestation and other largely human factors, 900 million hectares could be restored.

Returning that land to pasture, food crops or trees would convert enough carbon into biomass to stabilize emissions of CO2, the biggest greenhouse gas, for 15-20 years, giving the world time to adopt carbon-neutral technologies…

Key to returning dry lands to vegetation is the use of fertilizer, said Mansur. “Fertilizers are essential for increasing productivity. Good fertilizer in the right quantity is very good for the soil.”

Time

The Minnesota Diet

In this short story by Charlie Jane Anders, a relatively near-future (it refers to events “way back in the 2040s”) smart city is beset by supply chain problems with automated trucks that no human can seem to control. It also seems like nobody can leave. I’ll try not to spoil the plot but I’ll just list a few of the technologies woven into the story:

  • automated passenger and freight vehicles. Algorithms seem to determine who gets what in terms of food, and the government is not functional enough to step in. You can rent a car but where it can go depends on its software license.
  • jobs seem to be mostly professional tech and amorphous “business”, plus service jobs to support them. No truck drivers, construction workers, assembly line workers, etc.
  • “bioplastic” seems to be the key building material, produced by crops and/or genetically engineered fungus. Using crop land for this stuff rather than food seems to be part of the problem.
  • augmented reality goggles, but people are also still staring at screens
  • vertical farms producing maybe a sixth of the food supply. These seem to mostly or completely automated.

The title is a reference to the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which was a World War II-era scientific study in which people actually volunteered to (partially) starve and then test out different ways to recover. According to Wikipedia it was a diet of about 1500 calories per day consisting mostly of potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, bread and macaroni for 24 weeks. It actually doesn’t sound all that terrible to me because these are relatively filling, satisfying foods. But 24 weeks sounds like a long, long time. I think I could handle this for 24 days if I was allowed unlimited seasonings and condiments, and maybe a beer or two on Fridays.