I am interested in efficiency in all aspects of personal and community life. I believe the infrastructure of a city has a direct and powerful impact on the efficiency of all individual and business endeavors within or through the city, and therefore should be a focal point of (re)designing and (re)engineering cities.

The reading and lecture focused my interest on infrastructure by clearly demonstrating the importance of roadways, building systems, internet connection, and power distribution on the social hierarchy and sense of “place.” By eliminating or degrading one of those four subcategories of modern infrastructure, one is monumentally increasing the challenge of social and economic progress in that area. Although infrastructure inequality is commonplace, and in some ways necessary, for our capitalist society (imagine Penobscot, Maine, a village of 1200, with the same level of infrastructure as New York City) I believe there are basic cost- and effort-effective methods to improve infrastructure in most cities.

My own experience in cities stems from my hometown of Moline, Illinois, population ~45,000. Although Moline is a smaller city, we are part of a group called the “Quad Cities” (a misnomer, since there are five major cities). The greater Quad City region encompasses nearly 250,000 people, and, being the largest population for more than an hour in any direction, likes to think of itself as a larger city. I’m not sure how the infrastructure in my “city” compares to Portland or even New York, though I look forward to investigating it throughout the semester!

Peter Nauffts

I’m drawn, for mostly personal reasons, to the housing research group. My childhood (and still current) home is a rather small, rent-stabilized apartment in New York City (on the Upper West Side). Who lives in a neighborhood—and who can afford to live in a neighborhood—seems as clear a way to elucidate socioeconomic patterns of exclusion and inclusion as any. Housing prices dictate so many of our expectations for a neighborhood, from quality of education to safety, as well as the kinds of public spaces and infrastructure that the area provides. This is something I perhaps took for granted as a child growing up in New York.

I am particularly interested in the dimension of time as it relates to housing. How fast is a neighborhood gentrifying can be seen in many places, but housing seems as good as any a barometer. I have watched my neighborhood change rather dramatically over my 21 years of existence. Broadway is now mostly an arbitrary (and excessive) collection of banks, Verizon stores, Starbucks’, and banks. Is this simply the natural life (or decay) of a city—the mark of progress? Is stasis an option?

I take from the Dolores Hayden the interesting if brief discussion of Henri Lefebvre’s notion of economic production and social reproduction and space.[1] There is always a powerful nostalgia, or so it seems, in my parents voices among many others when they talk about the way the neighborhood used to be. Yet Lefebvre makes me wonder if in fact we have in all these spaces what we deserve: banks for wealthy people to conveniently withdraw and spend money, Starbucks’ for the type of service or more abstract labor that the denizens of this neighborhood engage in.

As far as smart cities go, I have to admit that I have never considered smart technology’s applicability to housing. I admit, too, I don’t own an iPhone—but still, I think it would be fascinating to consider smart technology in relation to this problem. Perhaps its applicability is not so well suited to an app, as a public space project might be. It does seem to be well-suited to mapping, however. I would be fascinated to watch, over time, the sort of tidal rise in housing prices as it consumes a city, spreading outwards slowly but surely. And less directly related, I am sure there would be a strong correlation between housing price and the demand for more high-tech security—Rio style—that Townsend speaks of.[2]

[1] Hayden, Dolores. 1997. “Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and Politics of Space.” In The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, 18-19. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

[2] Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia [Anthony Townsend]. 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1evCV6_e8Q&feature=youtube_gdata_player