#42: Sunk Cost City
In the past decade or so, a confluence of technological forces—the refinement of the smartphone, online retail, digital mapping, and the endless data that used to escape uncaptured and unexamined—have all transformed the urban experience, via cities' physical infrastructure as well as the way information flows through them. Recent waves of breathless hyperbole, which have accompanied every urban phase change that mattered, indicate that these developments are indeed formidable, and even if this moment isn't quite another urban renaissance, it has at least sparked a serious revival of interest in cities and their problems. The relationship between cities and new technology has always been complicated; sometimes symbiotic, sometimes parasitic, often out of control but more commonly just tense: The heavy, complacent built environment is characterized by inertia, and as thousands of forces are constantly trying to change that landscape, it stubbornly tries to stay the same.
Absorbing the new is a perennial challenge for cities; there’s usually a limit to how much change or novelty a city can handle at once. New York's prolonged hangover from Robert Moses’s highway binge is just one example. Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of American Cities, affirms one aspect of this truth in explicit terms: “Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.” We all recognize this on an aesthetic level, even if just subconsciously—uniformly new environments feel like malls, uniformly old ones feel like amusement parks—but the principle's true value is economic. New things cost money and in places where everything is new, life often becomes too expensive for anything interesting to happen there. “Chain stores, chain restaurants, and banks go into new construction,” Jacobs writes. “But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants, and pawn shops go into older buildings.” Other old “stuff” has similar value: Fully amortized, it becomes available for the lower-margin purposes it couldn't serve when it was new.
One school of economic rationalism maligns the lingering presence of old, paid-for stuff as “sunk costs," correctly recognizing that a lot of what we built fifty or a hundred years ago, we wouldn't build now. The term implies a desire for a clean slate alongside a grudging acknowledgement that we're stuck with what's sunk, but get it for free in a sense. A hubristic wish runs from modernism and Robert Moses through many of our present urban interventions, that we might somehow put all those sunk costs back into play, certain that we'd build everything more optimally this time. And there's a chance we would succeed. But as Jacobs points out, all that clutter serves a more important purpose than merely working, one to which a Bezos or a Musk might be less attuned: We already paid for it.
Reads:
A neural network trained on thousands of band names generated an imaginary Coachella lineup.
Adrian Chen on the Google Arts & Culture app, the repurposing of cultural material, and how the app is training us as well as Google's algorithms: the "coded gaze."
In 2012, China built a new African Union headquarters building in Addis Ababa free of charge. It turned out the building was full of hidden microphones and transmitting all recorded voice data back to China.
Until next time,
Drew