CITIES

THE HIGHEST CITIES

DONNA LEINWAND, USA TODAY - The San Francisco metropolitan area has a
higher percentage of people who are regular drug users than any other
major metropolitan area in the USA, a study from the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration found. Nearly 13% of San Francisco
residents reported using some type of illicit drug, such as marijuana,
cocaine or heroin, in the previous month, according to data from the
National Surveys on Drug Use and Health 2002-05. The national average is
8.1%.

Other areas with drug-abuse rates higher than the national average
included Seattle, 9.6%; Detroit, 9.5%; Philadelphia, 9.1%; and Boston,
8.5%. Cities with the lowest drug use: Houston, 6.2%; and Washington,
Dallas and Riverside/San Bernardino, Calif., all at 6.5%. . .

Chicago, at 25.7%, and Houston, at 25.6%, have the highest rates of
binge drinking in the country. Nationwide, 22.7% of people reported
binge drinking in the previous month, defined by the study as having
five or more drinks on one occasion. Other areas with rates higher than
the national average are Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, San Francisco
and Phoenix.

Nationwide, about one quarter of the population smokes cigarettes
regularly. Only Detroit significantly exceeded the national average,
with 27.4% of its residents reporting that they smoked cigarettes in the
previous month, the study found. California's biggest cities had the
lowest smoking rates, with 17.9% of people in San Francisco and Los
Angeles and 19.2% in Riverside reporting previous-month use, the study
found.

SINCE SAN FRANCISCO is the city with the greatest illicit drug use and
DC is one of those with the least (but the most cops), we thought we'd
check and see how the war on drugs was keeping us safe. Turns out that
in 5 of 7 categories of crime - including all categories of violent
crime - it was safer to be living around those awful Frisco druggies.

http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~r/UsatodaycomNation-TopStories/
~3/72248008/2007-01-07-sf-drugs_x.htm

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NEW USES FOR ALLEYS

JONATHAN ROWE, ON THE COMMONS - Now comes word from Baltimore, where
inner city neighbors are starting to close off alleys and turn them into
protected commons for socializing and children's play. The move is a
commonsense answer to a number of problems that many city dwellers face.
They don't know their neighbors. They feel confined in their apartments.
Their children lack safe places in which to play. Crime flourishes in
the social void. All these things help drive people to the suburbs,
which worsens sprawl, traffic and the rest.

All of them moreover are related in some degree to the grid that
consigns us to small and separate spaces. But wait a minute, look out
back. There's an alley there, running right down the middle of the
interior of the block. Probably it is a mess: trash, rats, carcasses of
old washing machines and even cars. Drug dealers hang out there; junkies
shoot up. It's not a place you like to spend much time.

But it's space. What if you could fix it up, even turn it into a park?
What if neighbors lowered their back fences, opened up their yards to
the new shared space? What if they put gates at the ends, with locks, so
that children could play safely and neighbors could plant gardens and
install benches without worries about intruders? Then, what if people on
the block actually gave a portion of their backyards to the new commons
to make it bigger. Each one would lose a little. But together they would
gain so much.

In fact there are projects along this line in numerous cities around the
country. In Baltimore, the idea took hold on a block in the Patterson
Park neighborhood. With help from Community Greens, a project of the
Ashoka Foundation, residents there got permission from the city to gate
the alley. Then they cleaned it up, installed painted planters, and held
a big block party. They haven't widened the space yet or turned it into
a park but they are talking about it. Some residents have lowered their
fences so they actually can see their neighbors and talk with them. . .

On Stanton Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side there is a low income
project that was designed with help from people the community. They
scrapped the typical project model of structures set on an exposed
landscape, and opted instead for one flush to the sidewalk with an
enclosed inner courtyard. Children actually have a safe place to play,
in a neighborhood that not that long ago was a drug combat zone. The
apartments are designed so that parents can watch their children from
the kitchen window, and even from the laundry room. . .

Even in Baltimore there have been charges of elitism and exclusivity.
How can it be a commons if it is not open to everyone? Those alleys are
city property after all. The question goes to the very nature of a
commons ­ a finite, land-based one at least. (Infinite commons, such as
language, knowledge, and the internet are different in this regard.)
Finite commons must have rules of access; and historically, this access
usually has been defined locally.

You couldn't just show up in Boston with a cow in colonial days and
expect to graze it on the Boston Common. The Common was for residents of
Boston. It was common to a defined group and exclusive to others. This
is how most commons have worked; and it is why the "tragedy of the
commons" thesis is a canard, as the author, Garret Hardin, came to see
late in his life. The tragedy thesis assumes no rules of access; which
means that it assumes away history. As E.F. Thompson, the historian,
once put it, commoners "have not been so lacking in common sense."

http://onthecommons.org/node/1067/print

LEWIS MUMFORD, THE CITY IN HISTORY - If the layout of a town has no
relation to human needs and activities other than business, the pattern
of the city may be simplified: the ideal layout for the business man is
that which can be most swiftly reduced to standard monetary units for
purchase and sale. The fundamental unit is no longer the neighborhood or
the precinct, but the individual building lot, whose value can be gauged
in terms of front feet. . .

Such plans fitted nothing but a quick parceling of the land, a quick
conversion of farmsteads into real estate, and a quick sale. The very
absence of more specific adaptations to landscape or to human purpose
only increased, by its very indefiniteness and designlessness, its
general usefulness for exchange. Urban land, too, became now became a
mere commodity, like labor: its market value expressed its only value.
Being conceived as a purely physical agglomeration of rentable
buildings, the town planned on these lines could sprawl in any
direction, limited only by gross physical obstacles and the need for
rapid public transportation. Every street might become a traffic street;
every section might become a business section.

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