American Places: Mind, Memory And Mobility

 

This morning I read a report that metro Atlanta's population is expected to grow to 9 million residents in the next twenty-five years. That's up from 6.5 million today. The bulk of this increase has to come from somewhere other than fecundity and foreign immigration. It rests in a combination of internal migration from one city to another or from small town and rural America into a major city.

The draw of the urban magnet has been cycling across the country for several decade and shows no sign of stopping. Although the city offerss a large spectrum of opportunity, I think the decision to locate comes at some cost particularly for those entering a major metropolitan experience for the first time. There may of course come a time when an individual or family may no longer need or want all that experience offers. In such cases a return to town and countryside can be a welcome change.

Over a decade ago, a meandering road trip across the Midwes and Plains to Idaho brought to mind the meaning of place in the context of motivation and freedom of mobility. I think those observations are as true today as they were those years ago and deserve to be the bulk of this post.

Vastness is a striking element of the High Plains and Northern Rockies. Distant features on the horizon seem pushed beyond unreachable by the perspective. There is a similar vastness overhead in that huge dome of sky, but interestingly, it seems so close that one could reach deep into it and grab a handful of cloud. But it only works directly overhead. Look to the side and the perspective makes one feel very insignificant. In sum, it is a landscape of isolation. At the same time, the great cultural quilt called the Public Land Survey System, a concept out of the mind of Thomas Jefferson, insured that settlers would have roads, schools and urbanization, at least on a small scale.

In the century or so that this region has been settled by the farmer, the miner, and the merchant, thousands of towns have indeed developed. I visited many of them, the smaller towns, on my journey: Glendo, Wentzville, Buffalo, Percival, Harlowton, Beatrice, Medora, Yanktown, Glendive, Mobridge, Forsyth, Roundup, Dickerson, Washburn. Some of them seemed to be thriving; others just holding their own. For most, the shining moments had long passed into the vacant storefronts, quiet streets, a subsistence economy, and aging population. Still, there was a sense of pride in those towns. The commemorations were evident in their vernacular monumentation to origins, the famous and infamous, the veterans living and dead, to love of country, and to spiritual beliefs. Elementary schools, regardless of age, were also well kept, reflecting the enthusiasm of their young charges who couldn't care less about the adult realities around them.

Why do these places survive? Whether it is yesterday or a century earlier, it takes a special kind of person to stay in the rural Dakotas and Montana no matter how beautiful the land. I can't think of more than a handful of my urban friends who would be interested. Perhaps these small towns persist because they are a product of the investment in the tough, isolated life around them. The sense of ownership, of "home," must be strong among these people as is the bonding. But, are the incentives social or are they driven by a range of economic factors from self-employment to poverty? I can't answer that. I can say, however, that today's small towns everywhere face a continuing out-migration to large metropolitan areas. It is a trend likely to continue. The towns in my list have lost many of their ambitious young adults to Bismarck, Great Falls, Rapid City and bright lights beyond. The older populations left behind sustain them and may do so in the future. After all, I expect many of the sons and daughters will return "home" to end out their lives in the places that nurtured them. Will that be enough? I suspect not, for abandoned towns are a rather common feature in urban history over much of the globe. As a man binds his house, so a town binds its people, but permanency is not a part of the formula. Let us accept it and move on.

I'm leaving tomorrow but I don't want to go

I love you my town, you'll always live in my soul

But I can see the sun's setting fast

And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts

Walking In Places

Forsyth Park, Savannah, Georgia

There was a time not so long ago when recreational walking was a popular pastime in the United States. The computer and its games, the focus on the automobile as transportation, an aging population, and other demographic and cultural variables have taken a big toll on this activity. Indeed, we've come a long way from the time Mom sent us out the door after a summer lunch and didn't expect to see us until the street lights came on.

OTR has lived somewhat outside this transition. A career in our national parks gave him some unforgettable experiences including multi-day treks across the Grand Canyon's Tonto Bench, over the woodland trails and beach of Cumberland Island, and almost all of the 184 miles of towpath on the C&O Canal. His job responsibilities kept him "in the traces" into his sixties as he walked hundreds of miles over hundreds of trails from the Mississippi River southeast to the U.S. Virgin Islands. No question, there is less walking in his retirement, much of it due to some minor though irritating disabilities.

Today, recreational trail use, even in the national parks, has dropped dramatically over the past twenty years. Park visitors don't walk nearly as much these days. And worse, on a national scale, our children don't go outside much either. Among park professionals and other outdoor enthusiasts, there is a serious concern that we are raising a generation of citizens who will no longer appreciate nature or preserve its resources into the future.

Tom Vanderbilt has a four-part essay at Slate examining the lost experience of walking in an urban setting. Readers will learn what we once had, why we lost it, and how it can be rediscovered. An appreciation of safe and satisfying walks in our urban settings puts us only a few steps away from enjoying the wilder places in our world.

H/T to Glenn Reynolds and Instapundit.

Who's On First?: Kennewick Man Meets The Beauty Of Xiaohe

OTR has never had much use for superlatives including the terms "first people" and "Native American." He was trained by the first generation of students of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School of cultural geography where the study of origins, diffusion, and landscape reigned. There was nothing static about places studied under such a lens. Waves of settlement, often over thousands of years, modified landscapes. The people, objects, structures and sites in each wave left rich resources for study by anthropologists and archaeologists. The Sauer School took information from these and other fields to define places throughout the world. Also, by studying the diffusion of cultural items, geographers traced peoples and cultures to their supposed points of origin.

In this day and age of political correctness, being declared the "first culture" has its advantages, often dispensed in the form of privilege, property and money. When the declaration is by law, the limitations of such thinking becomes very evident. The best example in the United States is the term, "Native American." It is purely a legal term. If your tribe is recognized by the federal government, you are a "Native American." If your tribe does not meet the criteria for recognition, you will be forced to settle for the term, American Indian. All Native Americans are Indians, but not all Indians are Native Americans. The "natives" get the privilege, property, and money. The Indians may have the genes, but they don't get the recognition. So confusing. And what happens when those waves of settlement produce something that doesn't fit the legal model? OTR thinks the same question emerges when cultural geographers run out of evidence. Is this really the original? Could there be earlier waves lost to catastrophe?

These questions arose in 1996 with the discovery of Kennewick Man, a prehistoric skeleton found on the banks of the Columbia River. There was no controversy at first, but one soon emerged when scientists revealed this 9500 year old skeleton was not genetically related to any Native American tribes. In fact, he is more genetically associated with the ancestors of the Ainu people of northern Japan. The tribes saw this as a serious threat to their nativity claim and began a protracted legal battle for the skeleton and a quick ceremonial burial. It didn't happen, as Kennewick Man remains the property of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The value of being first isn't confined to the shore of the Columbia River, the United States or even the Western Hemisphere. It seems the same thinking surrounding Kennewick Man has now forced the Beauty of Xiaohe out of an exhibit making its rounds in the United States. Beauty was buried in Xinjiang province in western China about 4000 years ago. Today, that province is filled with oil and a strong separatist sentiment. The fact that Beauty has distinctive Caucasian features emphasizing the Western origins of Xinjiang isn't helping the situation. The Chinese government wants no part of that Western linkage to show. This is a case where millions of barrels of oil trump diversity and the truth.

OTR wonders how many more model breaking surprises await us as we play this and similar games of who's on first. While identity politics has been lucrative for Native American tribes, good fortune has come at a cost, often to the traditional culture it was designed to preserve. He thinks we could build more beneficial political constructs out of our academic models. The pursuit of honesty would be a good start. As for the argument about "firsts," OTR recalls walking the streets of Old Oraibi, a village on the Hopi Indian Reservation in northern Arizona. People in Old Oraibi have been doing that for almost a thousand years. The folks on Charlotte Street in St. Augustine - "our nation's oldest city" - don't like it one bit. And Old Oraibi is a relatively new town when you examine settlement history in the Western Hemisphere.

Can Dying Cities Be Saved?

Veronique de Rugy has a post at NRO applauding Reason TV's six-part series on the question of saving our declining cities. The series focuses on Cleveland, a city she notes ranked as the sixth largest in the nation in 1950. Here is your link to her post and more.

City Cycles

When OTR left his hometown more than fifty years ago, there were five major industries within an easy commute and thousands took advantage of the high union wages. Today, only two of those industries remain. Both operate at significantly reduced levels. One of them - the paper mill - may soon be on life support due to international trade and environmental issues.

Smaller towns, particularly those in the old industrialized East and Midwest, face similar challenges as the post-industrial world leaves its imprint across the national landscape. When all the variables are positive, the field of urban geography is filled with examples of persistent settlement. When we examine the record, it becomes clear that those variables will likely drive many if not most towns out of existence. It is a hard fate to accept when that town has birthed and nurtured those who can still remember the good times. USA TODAY has explored these issues in a story about Ravenswood, West Virginia. Link to the story here. Be sure to check the comments, now numbering over 1400 at the last update.

More Detroit: Potential For The Urban Prairie

Check out this post from The Urbanophile for some cutting edge ideas on the future of Detroit. Even if you don't care about urban studies, you''ll enjoy the graphics. All of this comes by way of a brief opinion piece by Michael Barone - a Detroit native - in the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential column. If this is your subject, be sure to link to the other Urbanophile columns he mentions.

Source: Instapundit

Our Town

Three weeks and 7000 miles on the road, much of it in new territory, generates a score of story threads, each one screaming for elaboration. The priorities are falling into place. The piles of reference materials with notes on notes get a bit neater but never what one would call orderly. Even the electronic outlines show signs of healthy word growth. Somehow, sometime, coherent essays will come out of all of this. For now, I'm still content to wander - and wonder - over the whole expanse of people and places over time. Occasionally, observations in search of comment fly off this great spiral. Here's one of them.




Vastness is a striking element of the High Plains and Northern Rockies. Distant features on the horizon seem pushed beyond unreachable by the perspective. There is a similar vastness overhead in that huge dome of sky, but interestingly, it seems so close that one could reach deep into it and grab a handful of cloud. But it only works directly overhead. Look to the side and the perspective makes one feel very insignificant. In sum, it is a landscape of isolation. At the same time, the great cultural quilt called the Public Land Survey System, a concept out of the mind of Thomas Jefferson, insured that settlers would have roads, schools and urbanization, at least on a small scale.

In the century or so that this region has been settled by the farmer, the miner, and the merchant, thousands of towns have indeed developed. I visited many of them, the smaller towns, on my journey: Glendo, Wentzville, Buffalo, Percival, Harlowton, Beatrice, Medora, Yanktown, Glendive, Mobridge, Forsyth, Roundup, Dickerson, Washburn. Some of them seemed to be thriving; others just holding their own. For most, the shining moments had long passed into the vacant storefronts, quiet streets, a subsistence economy, and aging population. Still, there was a sense of pride in those towns. The commemorations were evident in their vernacular monumentation to origins, the famous and infamous, the veterans living and dead, to love of country, and to spiritual beliefs. Elementary schools, regardless of age, were also well kept, reflecting the enthusiasm of their young charges who couldn't care less about the adult realities around them.

Why do these places survive? Whether it is yesterday or a century earlier, it takes a special kind of person to stay in the rural Dakotas and Montana no matter how beautiful the land. I can't think of more than a handful of my urban friends who would be interested. Perhaps these small towns persist because they are a product of the investment in the tough, isolated life around them. The sense of ownership, of "home," must be strong among these people as is the bonding. But, are the incentives social or are they driven by a range of economic factors from self-employment to poverty? I can't answer that. I can say, however, that today's small towns everywhere face a continuing out-migration to large metropolitan areas. It is a trend likely to continue. The towns in my list have lost many of their ambitious young adults to Bismarck, Great Falls, Rapid City and bright lights beyond. The older populations left behind sustain them and may do so in the future. After all, I expect many of the sons and daughters will return "home" to end out their lives in the places that nurtured them. Will that be enough? I suspect not, for abandoned towns are a rather common feature in urban history over much of the globe. As a man binds his house, so a town binds its people, but permanency is not a part of the formula. Let us accept it and move on.

I'm leaving tomorrow but I don't want to go
I love you my town, you'll always live in my soul
But I can see the sun's setting fast
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts

Planning It Right For Cities In Demand

Leesburg, Virginia was a small dot on the map when I moved to Washington in 1964. Today, it's a historic core surrounded by development based on our society's love for the automobile. I haven't been there in twenty years. Even then, it was overrun with cars. As Ben Adler writes in The American Prospect, its probably too late for Leesburg, but not for other towns and counties that find themselves part of exurbia.

This is s nice companion piece to today's post on planning strategies in Flint. Michigan. Thanks to James Joyner and Outside the Beltway for the story.

Downsizing Cities In Decline

Every day I thank my long-departed mom and dad for having the courage to separate their family from the economic and social decline of the Appalachian Rust Belt. Leaving "home," the house itself, nearby family members, and the sense of security and place offered by those ancient mountains was not an easy decision. At the same time, ambition and declining opportunity can be powerful motivators when in tandem. But what happens to those who stay? The region my parents left fifty years ago began to reach a stasis around 2000 after years of slow, steady decline. With a few exceptions, the population centers became ghosts of their former selves. I expect substantial improvement in the next fifty years because the area will become the exurbs of Washington. Four generations is a long time to return to modest prosperity.

What happens if there is no Washington on the horizon? What happens if the city is Flint, Michigan, one of many large cities in a nanny state where high business taxes, unsustainable union wages, and the costs of generous state benefits and services suppress private incentives? A contributor at NewMajority.com has some comment on Flint and its strategy to develop a viable community after losing half its population in the last forty years. Reading the link to the New York Times article is essential.

Reinventing Where America Lives

For most of the time in post-World War II America, I think a house was a reasonably accurate extension of the identity and character of its homeowners. That began to change for me in the mid-1990s, when my wife would return home with stories about the real estate explosion in the north Atlanta suburbs. It seemed that more and more people were buying huge, expensive homes in new developments along the Chattahoochee River corridor. Nothing wrong with that, with one exception. More than a few of the homes had virtually no furniture. Fast forward a decade and I'll bet those same houses stand empty of people. In other words, the "all hat, no cattle" lifestyle had come head to head with the reality of the financial and housing meltdown. As the decline enters its second year, the ability to purchase a house remains somewhat detached from reality, and the family you see moving in next door may not be what you get. Furthermore, occupancy rates and rental housing continue to mold the identity and character of many neighborhoods. With the Atlanta metro area now ranked as the third emptiest city in the country, you can bet change is the order of the day.

If you're a student of urban historical geography, all of this would make perfect sense, in part, because it would be interpreted perhaps in a less emotional environment. For homeowners, it is interpreted more in terms of property value, personal safety, quality schools, employment opportunity, and culture.

I discovered some "must read" articles on this subject, thanks to Tim Mak's "The Decline of Suburbia," appearing today on the blog, The New Majority. I think two of his sources demand special attention. They are:

Richard Florida's "How the Crash Will Reshape America," from The Atlantic Online; and

Alan Ehrenhalt's "Trading Places," appearing in The New Republic

A commenter provided a link to David Brooks's New York Times opinion column on a recent Pew Research Center study of American preferences for location and lifestyle. In general, I found comments, if available, to be of great interest.

Yes, I'm asking my readers to take on a long assignment here, but is a significant topic with serious social, economic, and political impacts for most Americans. If you get the feeling this subject was one aspect of my training and career, you'd be correct.

Photo by David Shankbone