Monday, 07 August 2006

Measuring sprawl

Sprawl I haven't followed through on this, but there's an interesting wee summary of a study of US urban sprawl in the current LSE Centrepiece.

The researchers compared satellite images from 1976 and 1992 (all this fancy technology, and we get data 14 years old?) to measure urban sprawl by calculating the average amount of open space in the neighbourhood of a house in each city.

They find that residential development was no more scattered in 1992 than it was previously. They also suggest that roads have no impact on development patterns: the road network tends to follow development patterns rather than vice versa.

7 Aug 2006 16:16:42 | Space and place

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Anti-social behaviour, state terrorism, representative democracy I hear several levels of argument about the middle east. Some are just claims and counter-claims about who fired first and who's to blame for doing this or that. These don't get us very far and we have to go to a deeper level, where we find gnarly and challenging issues like the international arms trade, the rights of civilians, codes of behaviour in war, propaganda and so on. At the more profound level, there are two key issues to do with the nature of democratic citizenship. First, there's the power of the Israeli lobby to distort US policy far beyond what is acceptable, which illustrates the classic difficulty in systems of representative democracy, of ensuring balance. As we think through the practicalities of neighbourhood governance rather closer to home, there is no harm in keeping this grotesque example in mind. Secondly we have the curiously overlooked point that terrorism can gain no purchase in a society which takes justice and equality seriously. What's happening internationally, as I implied before, helps us think locally, and vice versa. We see anti-social behaviour plus inadequate stewardship plus insufficiently accountable policing in the international arena, as we do in the local context. I'm not saying that injustice and inequality explain or excuse anti-social behaviour. But the nature of human social behaviour means that, in a community where equality and justice and inclusive policies are genuinely espoused and become culturally-embedded, anti-social behaviour cannot take hold and cannot reach a critical tipping point. So it is I believe with terrorism in any country. Terrorism will only gain footholds and accumulate formidable momentum where people experience high levels of persistent inequality and injustice. It's no good responding 'but definitions of fairness and justice vary - people make unreasonable claims about being treated unjustly' if there is no debate about these concepts. And if we reflect on the long and painful historical process of getting power holders in the west to allow such debates to take place, it helps to explain the difficulty that western leaders have in accommodating this issue: they don't tend to do empowerment if they can avoid it. Whether it's promoting a culture of aggressive enforcement rather than providing a sense of respectful support for young people; or condoning arrangements for poor foreign people's homes and neighbourhoods to be smithereened, I sense a complete political failure to grasp this fundamental principle. Some of our politicians have shown ignorant contempt for the central and interlinked importance of home, neighbourhood, equality and justice. The pic is of folk from the Day Mer community centre at today's anti-war march in London.
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Inequalities at the root Will principles of social justice and equality (meaning fairness) finally make it through to the top of global and local political agendas? The news this morning brings at last a focus on the sense of injustice and inequality which facilitates the process of radicalising young muslims. It relates closely to my comment last week: "Terrorism will only gain footholds and accumulate formidable momentum where people experience high levels of persistent inequality and injustice." The chemistry of terrorism is not that difficult to understand and one of its essential ingredients is a sense of unfairness. Shahid Malik said: "where you forget about right and wrong, where you think two wrongs equals a right ... those events are diminishing my ability to put forward arguments against extremism." The UK government stoutly insists there is no connection between acts of terrorism and its own policies - thereby both confirming my view that there is weak political understanding of this principle, and avoiding the question of the extent to which their policies have exacerbated inequalities. For many of us I suspect, the buoyant optimism of 1997-2001, when we had so many incisive and pioneering policy papers and measures, has sunk beneath the greedy centralisation of power and the 'exclusion of exclusion.' It's becoming graphically clear that this is a global crisis. There's something here about ordinary people in their own neighbourhoods facing the consequences of confrontations between frightening forces that are far beyond their powers to influence, and getting pitifully inadequate and belated responses from authorities. Many people in Belfast must be looking on with a sense of long-haul resignation. As if to accentuate that this is not just the Palestinian Territories, or Lebanon, or Birmingham or Walthamstow, here is an article in today's Guardian about the street violence in Sao Paulo: "It is an unrecognised civil war - only they are not political groups involved. It is the poor person versus anybody who has something, and that something need not even be very much."

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