De Lange Conference: Day One

Well that was fun! I just got back from day one of the De Lange Conference. This week I’ll be looking at the conference and the speakers, giving some recaps of what they had to say, and in many cases adding some additional background and commentary. Later in the week I’ll try and really dig in to a few of the best discussions that took place at the conference.

So, day one highlights!

Things started off a little late, but it was worth the wait. A panel of mayors gave presentations about their experiences and what is going on with their cities. The featured mayors were Antanas Mokus (former mayor) of Bogota, Columbia; Shuki Forer of Rehovat, Israel; and Mustafa Seyed Kamal of Karachi, Pakistan.

Mokus was definitely the highlight. He explained a series of initiatives he began in Bogota that led to significant improvements in the quality of city services and law enforcement. He broke down the whole idea of regulatory policy into a six dimension matrix, which I thought was extraordinarily insightful. I’ll definitely follow up on this more later.

Then we had a fun face to face between William Rees and Robert Brugeman. The two basically argued from separate directions that sprawl is the inevitable consequence of typical human behavior: spread out and use all the natural resources you can find. The difference was in their views about the effects of this.

Rees is the originator of the ecological footprint concept, and the author of “Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth.” He argued that the world population is already over its effective carrying capacity, and that the consequence of this was begining to manifest itself in the form of slowing energy and food production which is now unable to increase fast enough to keep up with population growth. At some point in the future, he posits, these supplies will become increasingly scarce. He states that the only reason average American’s don’t notice much of this happening around them is because we (and the rest of the developed world) are wealthy enough to out-compete the developing world for resources when they get scarce, so we haven’t encountered significant shortages of any kind yet.

Brugeman is the author of “Sprawl: A Compact History.” His take was different, as he is mainly ambivalent about Sprawl. He essentially argued that people want more space as part of a more luxurious lifestyle as they gain wealth, and that they simultaneously have fewer children. Therefore, sprawl isn’t a horrible thing, because it tends to be a sign of increasing economic activity, and therefore greater wealth and lower population growth. He also noted that cities are all trending toward a density level of about 10,000 people per square mile (he said a range of 5-15k), which is about the highest density you can reach in an auto-centric development pattern.

The challenge with Brugeman’s argument, is that he also goes out of his way to prove that the least sustainable people are the wealthiest, due to their high-consumption lifestyle. It’s hard to imagine how having slightly fewer children who are vastly heavier consumers than say, a middle-class family, is going to result in a more sustainable system.

The two had an interesting discussion during the Q&A session about the idea of a planetary carrying capacity, which is really where they differ. Brugeman thinks that it doesn’t exist, and of course Rees is adamant that it does.

I think the truth of this issue lies somewhere in the middle. While technology certainly can and will continue to improve our ability to extract resources, it will also allow people to extract resources beyond the sustainable limits of the system. There’s no reason to think that this can go on forever, when at a local level the human population has over-extracted resources and faced complete societal collapse as a result. Likewise there are examples of civilizations who strained their resources, then adjusted their habits to find a sustainable balance, and prospered thereafter.

Side note: The ancient history of the Americas is a vibrant record of people groups who drained their environments to a breaking point after which they could no longer sustain their civilizations. The Maya offer the best evidence of this, with multiple periods of rising affluence and technology followed by cultural collapse driven largely by resource depletion. There’s an excellent book on this subject, which I intend to feature in more detail later on. Stay tuned.

I had to miss the mid-afternoon sessions, so if anyone has the scoop on those and would like to share it, let me know in the comments. I’d also be happy to take notes in an email (neohouston{at}rocketmail{dot}com) if you’d prefer, and I’ll post it on the blog if it’s good!

I came back in for Elijah Anderson’s presentation about the subculture of the inner cities and the issues of structural poverty. He made an interesting observation on what he called the three prongs of the poverty-economy: low wage jobs, welfare, and the underground economy (bartering and crime). He stated that when one of these become unavailable, residents then have to move to the next: ie, when they can’t get work they try to get welfare, and then turn to crime as a last resort. He then lamented that the biggest problem was the lack of accessible jobs for people who have low education, and suggested that if we could do more to provide more in the way of blue-collar jobs that we could fix much of the problem of structural poverty in this country.

He also suggested that this would do a lot to bridge the last major ‘racial divide,’ which is the stigma that a black (or other minority) individual is more likely to be suspected of being a criminal, even if that person is a middle-class law-abiding citizen who is no part of the environment of structural poverty. He told a really sad story about a kid in law school who was harassed and embarrsed by the police in front of the other students at the law school where he was studying, because some neighbors in the area heard a gunshot (which turned out to be an accidental misfire in someone else’s property) and assumed that he (as the only black resident of the area) must have tried to shoot someone, and therefore called the police to report him for this imagined crime.

Such stories are truly frustrating, and I can only imagine it must have been an infuriating experience. I do think that our society is progressing past blind stereotypes and these stories will someday be a thing of the past, but I also doubt that we’ll ever live in a perfectly harmonious society. Working to eliminate structural poverty certainly is a worthy goal, though, whether it’s the cure for the last vestiges of racism in America or not.

The last speaker was Joel Kotkin, who is a big fan of Houston. He refers to Houston as the Opportunity City, and took some time today to describe what he feels is the critical difference between a place like New York (a luxury city) and Houston (an opportunity city). Houston, he said, is an ‘inventory of the possible’, a place that offers the chance for upward mobility. This is another session that I’ll dig into more in a follow up post. Kotkin took time to discuss his friendship with Tory Gattis, and I suspect Tory will have something to say about Kotkin’s presentation as well.

Alright, that’s the most I can do at the end of an extremely busy day! I’ll have more on the De Lange conference all this week, and more in-depth on the best sessions after the conference wraps up on Wednesday.