As usual, the Freakonomics blog has some interesting stuff on it–in particular, this interview with Paul Romer on his idea to create charter cities as a means of changing the institutional context for development.
Maybe I’ll return to these idea when I am not racing around at a conference….
The Beeb features this story on Bend, Oregon:
The population of Bend quadrupled in under 20 years – from 20,000 to 80,000.
Between 2001 and 2005, the median value of a home in Bend rose by 80%.
By 2005, work was getting underway on 700 new homes each month. Some of the developments are stunning: houses filled with mountain light clinging to craggy hillsides.
Only now:
Downtown Bend looks like a shrine to post-millenial bijou: pricey shoes, scented candles, fancy coffee. There is even a shop specialising in beachwear – despite Bend’s location in the high desert.
But when the US slumped, Bend crashed. The value of a home fell 40% in under two years.
And unemployment nearly quadrupled from around 4% two years ago to 15% in the summer of 2009.
“Everything that Bend produced relied on the credit market”, says Carolyn Eagan, an economist with the Oregon Department of Employment.
My former colleagues at Virginia Tech, Rob Lang and Jennifer Lefurgy, examined the Boomburg phenomenon in their excellent book: Boomburbs: The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities.
Well, as I am apparently not finishing my revisions with any alacrity, nor am I organizing my work effort, nor am I, apparently, sleeping, I might as well be reading. I’ve been reading Who’s Your City by Richard Florida, and I wish it were good but it is not.
William Langewiesche appears regularly in the Atlantic, and I think his work is just fantastic–right up there with John McPhee. Here is a collection of my favorites:
Eden: A Gated Community: After making a fortune as founder of North Face and Esprit, Douglas Tompkins embraced the principles of deep ecology. Then, forsaking civilization, he bought a Yosemite-sized piece of wilderness in Chile, where only he and a like-minded few would live. They intended to show the world how an eco-community could flourish even as the ancient forest was kept pristine. Tompkins ran into one big problem: other people.
Profits of Doom: One of the most polluted cities in America learns to capitalize on its contamination.
The Ship Breakers: At Alang, in India, on a six-mile stretch of oily, smoky beach, 40,000 men tear apart half of the world’s discarded ships, each one a sump of toxic waste. Environmentalists in the West are outraged. The shipbreakers, of course, want to be left alone — and maybe they should be.
Langewiesche has a book out that I am going to go buy when I get a chance to walk over to the book store: The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom of Chaos, and Crime.
 | drschweitzer on Formosa 1140 |
 | Jeff Jacobberger on Formosa 1140 |
| drschweitzer on The Perfect City |
 | Joy on The Perfect City |
| Colleges as guilty a… on Ho boy–Suing a college f… |
