Monday Mailing 072919

Monday Mailing

Year 25 • Issue 44 29 July 2019 1.

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Farmers Earn More From YouTube Than Their Crops (Emily Bradley) The To-Do List For Cities 20 Years From Now From South Korea To Malaysia, The ‘Smart Cities’ Hailed As Answer To World’s Urban Ills Turn To Ghost Towns (Gabriel Leon) Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America An Inversion Of Nature: How Air Conditioning Created The Modern City (Emily Bradley) Oregonians Worry New Zoning Law May Change Neighborhoods In an Era of Extreme Weather, Concerns Grow Over Dam Safety Emotions Flare As Portland, Long Friendly To Neighborhoods, Weighs Gutting Their Powers The Roots of Workplace Gender Inequality WEBINAR - Designing for Resilience Across Scales, Systems and Sectors

1. Farmers Earn More From YouTube Than Their Crops

It’s a sign of the times when farmers make more money advocating for the industry on social media than actually farming.

Quote of the Week:

“Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.”

- Aldous Huxley

Oregon Fast Fact #20

In 1880 a sea cave was discovered near what is now known as Florence. Sea Lion Caves is known to be the largest sea cave in the world.

Zach Johnson, who grows corn and soybeans in Minnesota, is known in YouTube circles as MN Millennial Farmer. It’s a role, he says, that’s provided him and his wife, Becky, about five times more in earnings than he can make on the family farm in the last year.

Johnson, 34, became a video blogger three years ago to advocate for growers and the technology they use. Now, he and Becky have about 300,000 subscribers and 50 million views under their belts.

Their experience reflects both the depressed state of the rural economy and growing consumer interest in how food is produced.

“Yes, we use GMOs, we use pesticides, drain tiles and irrigation and there are real reasons why we use those things,” Johnson said in an interview. He describes his role as bringing balance to a discussion often dominated by critics of modern farming practices.

The Johnsons aren’t alone online. In rural communities across the U.S., YouTube, a unit of Google, is the most popular social media with 59% of people using it, according to a Pew Research Center survey in 2018.

Keith Good is the social media manager at the Farmdoc project at the University of Illinois, created to provide online data and analysis that will aid decision-making for farms under risk. Over the last year,

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he’s seen a dramatic increase in farmers posting more videos on social media.

To access the full story, click here.

2. The To-Do List For Cities 20 Years From Now

What will city planners, civil society, and the private sector be focused on in 2040?

A lot could change between now and then. But absent a world-changing event or discovery, we have a pretty good idea how the challenges of 21st century cities might line up.

From preparing for climate change to expanding affordable housing options, the agenda will be brimming. Here are some predictions for the major tasks cities will be undertaking.

Confronting climate change.

Compared to today, projected impacts of warming will wreak havoc on human settlement more regularly and intensely, whether sea level rise, storm surge, extreme weather, heat waves, drought, wildfire, or mudslides. Adaptation and resilience measures will be in full swing, and the most problematic coastal areas will be returned to their natural state. Meanwhile, cities will continue their role as leaders in mitigation: converting to renewable power sources, making all new construction zero-carbon and retrofitting older buildings, and reaping the low-emission benefits of walkable, compact, transit-served urbanism. The importance of land use and sustainable policies for land will be ever more apparent. Climate will be the central occupation of political leaders, planners, and the private sector. The extent to which the work is more like emergency triage will depend on what steps are taken in the next five years.

Building green and blue infrastructure.

This common-sense solution deserves a heading all its own: designing and restoring natural systems to manage stormwater, diminish flooding, lower heat island effects, sequester carbon, revitalize public spaces, and improve public health. The running start by the Dutch on this front will look all the more prescient, including new ways of working with water (not just trying to keep the water out). Virtually every piece of transportation, energy, and park infrastructure will be built under this new ethos; a waterfront park will be designed to be flooded during a storm, for example, and returned to a dry state once water has retreated. A 20th century visionary of ecological planning, Ian McHarg, will come to be regarded as the Jane Jacobs of resilience.

Innovations in public finance, including land value capture (see below), will be required to pay for this extraordinary mobilization.

To access the full story, click here.

3. From South Korea To Malaysia, The ‘Smart Cities’ Hailed As Answer To World’s Urban Ills Turn To Ghost Towns

Every morning, at 8:30am, an announcement is piped though a speaker in the ceiling of Kim Jong-won’s flat, barking the daily bulletin in a high-pitched voice. The disembodied broadcaster details new parking measures, issues with the pneumatic waste disposal chute and various building maintenance jobs to be carried out that day.

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“There’s no way of turning it off,” sighs Kim’s wife, Jung-sim, as she prepares breakfast. “I hate technology but my husband is an early adopter. He has to have everything first.”

It was Kim’s love of the latest tech that prompted him move his family to the future, or the nearest thing to it – Songdo, South Korea’s self-styled “smart city” [1] , built on a 600-hectare parcel of artificial land dredged from the Yellow Sea near Seoul’s Incheon airport. It is a place where the garbage is automatically sucked away through underground pipes, where lamp posts are always watching you, and where your block of flats knows to send the lift down to greet you when it detects the arrival of your car. Sensors in every street track traffic flow and send alerts to your phone when it’s going to snow, while you can monitor the children’s playground on television from the comfort of your sofa.

The feature Kim enjoys most is a small touch screen display on his kitchen wall that allows him to keep track of his and his wife’s consumption of electricity, water and gas and, most important, compare it against the average statistics for the building. Flicking between the screens of bar charts and graphs, a broad grin spreads across his face: for yet another day running, they are more energy-efficient than all their neighbours.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In

America

On the day Jathan Laverty turned 26, he was working at a Columbus, Ohio, coffee shop and freelancing as a corporate event technician, hoping to get a foot in the door of the event planning industry. This birthday turned that search for a full-time job into something urgent.

Laverty has Type 1 diabetes, and as of that day in 2017, he was no longer eligible for coverage under his parents’ health insurance. He found himself needing medication to live that he could not afford.

“It’s a human necessity for me,” Laverty, now 28, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s my life or death every time I do or don’t take insulin.”

Laverty faces a health care problem unique to many millennials with Type 1 diabetes who’ve been booted off their parents’ stable health insurance. The price of insulin, the drug that keeps them alive, tripled in the US from 2002 to 2013 — and a recent study found that, from 2012 to 2016, its average annual cost increased from $3,200 to $5,900.

That’s an impossible price tag for a generation still feeling the effects of the 2008 financial crisis and saddled with massive student loan debt and increasing housing costs. Studies show that US millennials are far worse off financially than previous generations, with an average net worth below $8,000.

The result is that these young adults are rationing, stockpiling, and turning to the black market for the medication they need to stay alive — incredibly risky and desperate measures that could result in long-term harm or death.

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About 1.25 million Americans have Type 1 diabetes, a disorder in which the immune system attacks the pancreas and interferes with the body’s ability to absorb energy from food.

To access the full story, click here.

5. An Inversion Of Nature: How Air Conditioning Created The Modern City

Once, when I was staying in Houston, Texas, my host was showing me round her house. It included a mighty fireplace.

“How often does it get cold enough to light a fire?” I asked, as what little I knew about the city included the fact that it is mostly hot and humid. Maybe once or twice a year, she replied, but her husband came from Wisconsin. He liked a log fire. So they would turn up the air conditioning and light one.

This was climate as television, to be summoned with the twiddle of a dial, the outcome of a century which started in 1902, when Willis Carrier was simply asked to find a way to prevent heat and humidity from warping the paper at the Brooklyn printing company Sackett-Wilhelms.

But the air-conditioning that he helped develop has changed buildings, and the ways they are used, more than any other invention: more than reinforced concrete, plate glass, safety elevators or steel frames. Its effects have directed the locations and shapes of cities. They have been social, cultural and geopolitical.

The shopping mall would have been inconceivable without air conditioning, as would the deepplan and glass-walled office block, as would computer servers. The rise of Hollywood in the 1920s would have been slowed if, as previously, theatres had needed to close in hot weather.

The expansion of tract housing in postwar suburban America relied on affordable domestic air conditioning units. A contemporary museum, such as Tate Modern or Moma, requires a carefully controlled climate to protect the works of art.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Oregonians Worry New Zoning Law May Change Neighborhoods Stewart Wershow wonders if in a few years, the tree-lined streets of his neighborhood north of Corvallis High School will look totally different.

Corvallis and other Oregon cities are grappling with a new bill requiring cities to allow duplexes, triplexes and other forms of denser housing in single-family neighborhoods.

Proponents of House Bill 2001 said places such as Corvallis, which has the smallest percentage of affordable housing of any Oregon city, could particularly benefit. The bill aims to increase the supply of affordable homes by allowing more kinds of houses in more neighborhoods.

But residents such as Wershow, president of his neighborhood association, say that won’t necessarily solve the housing shortage. They also worry about more traffic, noise and strain on city services.

“There are unintended consequences for what you do,” Wershow said.

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The bill, passed in June, affects cities of 10,000 people or more. Gov. Kate Brown is expected to sign it into law this summer, making Oregon the first state in the nation to effectively eliminate single-family housing zones.

Smaller cities between 10,000 and 25,000 people will have to allow duplexes in zones that were previously set aside just for single-family homes. Larger cities have to start allowing “middle housing” such as duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhouses and cottage clusters.

To access the full story, click here.

7. In an Era of Extreme Weather, Concerns Grow Over Dam Safety

Many of the United States’ 91,000 dams are aging and sorely in need of repairs that could collectively cost tens of billions of dollars. Experts are increasingly worried that as extreme precipitation events increase, dams are at greater risk of failure, threatening lives and posing environmental risks.

It is a telling illustration of the precarious state of United States dams that the near-collapse in February 2017 of Oroville Dam, the nation’s tallest, occurred in California, considered one of the nation’s leading states in dam safety management.

The Oroville incident forced the evacuation of nearly 190,000 people and cost the state $1.1 billion in repairs. It took its place as a seminal event in the history of U.S. dam safety, ranking just below the failures in the 1970s of two dams — Teton Dam in Idaho and Kelly Barnes in Georgia — that killed 14 and 39 people, respectively, and ushered in the modern dam safety era.

The incident at the half-century-old, 770-foot-high Oroville Dam, which involved partial disintegration of its two spillways⁠ during a heavy but not unprecedented rainstorm, signaled the inadequacy of methods customarily used throughout the country to assess dam safety and carry out repairs. It occurred as federal dam safety officials have made substantial progress in updating methods of dam assessment, in the process propelling dam safety practices into the 21st century. But federal and state dam safety officials have been unable to procure from disinterested state legislatures and Congress the tens of billions of dollars needed for repairs to the nation’s aging dam infrastructure.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Emotions Flare As Portland, Long Friendly To Neighborhoods, Weighs Gutting Their Powers As it gets more expensive to live in Portland, officials have been pondering: What to do when the city’s vaunted neighborhood associations seem to act more like swank homeowner associations?

The answer reached by a government committee – to erase neighborhood associations from the city code altogether – has dozens of neighborhood leaders sounding the alarm that their renowned system of civic engagement is under threat.

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That proposed undoing has board members of Portland’s nearly 100 neighborhood associations drawing battle lines against the city committee, officials in the Office of Community & Civic Life – the bureau that works with neighborhood associations – and the bureau’s commissioner-incharge, Chloe Eudaly.

It has also surfaced long-simmering tensions. Neighborhood activists view themselves as representatives of grassroots Portlanders and the distinctive parts of town they inhabit.

Detractors see the associations as entrenched, overly powerful voices for homeowners, who tend to be older, white and opposed to housing density, homeless shelters and other development helpful to a growing city’s health.

Sam Stuckey, for example, said neighborhood associations “are just there to be obstructionist and delay housing we desperately need.” Despite that qualm, Stuckey, a 32-year-old architect, sits on the Mill Park Neighborhood Association board.

“I think there’s some level of truth to that,” said Stan Penkin, chairman of the Pearl District Neighborhood Association, though that line of thinking fails to acknowledge “all the things that neighborhoods do that are positive.”

To access the full story, click here.

9. The Roots of Workplace Gender Inequality

Despite the half century of progress women have made toward attaining positions of power and authority in the workplace, the glass ceiling persists. The share of women in the executive suite has actually declined slightly in the last 20 years, and women remain woefully underrepresented in the partnership ranks of white-collar firms.

To help address this problem of female-employee advancement, a global professional services firm approached Irene Padavic, the Mildred and Claude Pepper Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Florida State University, and colleagues. But in a remarkable turn, the firm resisted the researchers’ findings and canceled the project. Padavic and her coauthors used the experience to further their investigation and ultimately formulated a novel explanation for the persistence of the firm’s gender inequality.

Although men made up 63 percent of the firm’s junior associates, 90 percent of the firm’s partners were male. Firm executives and employees repeatedly cited what the researchers label the “work-family narrative.” According to this account, the family commitments of female employees conflict with the demands of the job, which inevitably hold back their advancement.

But what the researchers found during their investigation, Padavic says, “led us to suspect that the work-family narrative was part of a social defense”—that is, a myth that helped maintain the status quo. “We then looked more closely at how men and women employees turned to psychological defensive processes … to distance themselves from painful realizations about the family costs of working such long hours.”

To access the full story, click here.

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10. WEBINAR - Designing for Resilience Across Scales, Systems and Sectors From climate change to rapid urbanization, social inequity to failing infrastructure, there are a wide variety of risks that can compromise a city’s ability to be competitive while also supporting the well-being of its residents.

Join the Smart Growth Network at 1 p.m. Eastern August 14 for a webinar that looks at these challenges and identifies opportunities to design resilient and adaptable cities in the face of these growing threats.

This session will examine resilience across scales, systems and sectors, review resilience concepts and look at what resilience means in the built environment.

Panelists Katie Wholey, Vincent Riscica and Amy Leitch of Arup will provide an overview of the key concepts for understanding resilience in the context of the built environment, discuss how resilience can be applied at a systems-level for transportation and infrastructure assets, and provide examples of how we can design more resilient buildings across various building typologies, such as healthcare institutions and laboratories.

To register for the webinar, click here.

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