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Slime
Mold and Cities
I’ve
got to admire anyone who can make a connection between slime
mold and city planning—a real, intellectual connection that
is, not a right-wing, anything-the-market-comes-up-with-is-good,
planner-bashing connection. It may only have been the promise
of such astonishing connections that originally led me to
read Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities,
and Software by Steven Johnson. (I know it doesn’t mention
slime mold in the title, but that’s really the most striking
example in the book. Not that the ants aren’t fascinating.)
Johnson is one of those blessed writers who can make reading
an entire nonfiction book about an extremely technical scientific
concept fun and painless. In a nutshell, emergence is the
process by which a complex system emerges from many individuals
following a simple set of rules, usually ones that involve
some form of positive feedback loop. There is no mastermind,
no monarch, no omnipotent CEO or board of directors. No one
is calling the shots, and the level of complexity that results
can be far beyond the intellectual capacity of the individual
participants.
Slime mold works roughly like this: Most of the time, it lives
as a collection of single-celled organisms on the forest floor.
But when food gets scarce, the cells coalesce into big blobs
that move as a unit and have probably inspired countless horror
flicks. In a wonderful example of how our social mores afflict
supposedly unbiased scientists, for a long time no one could
figure out how this worked because they assumed there had
to be “leader” or “commander” cells that somehow orchestrated
the coalescing timing and process. Turns out it’s not so:
When certain conditions are met, all the cells do two things:
(1) release a certain chemical, and (2) move toward concentrations
of that chemical. That’s enough.
The idea that allowing carefully chosen positive feedback
rules to churn out a bottom-up solution can get better results
than a top-down solution has since been applied to making
software, and Johnson argues it could also be used for city
planning. This could strike a balance between the admitted
problems of top-heavy, resource-intensive planning projects
and a total free-market approach. But it requires recognizing
what rules are in effect, how they are operating, and gathering
the will to change them.
In Albany, one issue that might benefit from some of this
thinking is abandoned properties, something that new mayoral
candidate Archie Goodbee has listed as one of his top concerns.
I had a conversation recently with Brien O’Toole of the Enterprise
Foundation, who has come to Albany as part of a city-supported
effort to address the dramatic extent of abandonment in the
city, particularly in Arbor Hill and the South End. His project,
which is both fascinating and somewhat controversial, is a
story for another day. But in describing the situation, he
shed some light on two of the underlying rules that are in
operation here.
First, during the Corning era, when the city wielded almost
total power over the county Democratic Party, Mayor Corning
arranged a deal whereby the county would actually pay the
city the amount it was losing on unpaid property taxes. In
“return,” it’s the county that forecloses on city properties
whose owners are delinquent on their taxes. Having just had
to shell out back taxes in cold hard cash, the county is understandably
eager to recoup something, and rushes the properties to auction.
The result? A city where most of the abandoned property is
in private hands rather than government hands, which is where
it is in most cities. This makes some of the more common approaches
to dealing with such properties, such as cities giving or
selling properties cheap to nonprofit developers, or packaging
sets of properties for other projects, rather more difficult
in Albany.
Pair that with a nice little anti-density provision in the
city zoning code: New construction in a R-2A or R-2C zone
(much of Arbor and West Hill) requires a 40-foot-wide lot.
In R-2B, which covers most of the rest of those neighborhoods,
detached housing requires 30 feet. Lots in Arbor Hill, however,
average 20- to 25-feet wide. So now you have a bunch of small-time
owners who picked up cheap vacant lots at the aforementioned
county auction—and find they can’t do a damn thing with them
unless they’d like to altruistically create a community garden.
(Not usually the vision of folks who go to county property
auctions.)
Add to this some underlying rules that are not unique to Albany:
As has been mentioned a few times recently in these pages,
a property-tax system that is based mostly on the assessed
value of a building, rather than the locational value of the
land, encourages neglect and abandonment because they make
property taxes go down, whereas investment in buildings is
rewarded with higher taxes.
Anti-sprawl advocates have also been talking for years about
other subtle ways that zoning, taxes and subsidies have been
resulting in disappearing open space and longer commutes.
These include highway and car-travel subsidies, fragmented
municipalities competing for tax revenue from business and
jobs, and Superfund rules that make an unwitting purchaser
of a polluted site responsible for cleanup. (Remember, the
claim that sprawling low-density living is what people want
is only relevant when they’re not offered anything else. In
several studies, people picked thriving, higher-density urban
areas as more appealing when presented with several options.)
The recent report from the Open Space Institute that sounds
a warning about New York state’s loss of open space is one
more reminder of how these things march on.
Now, I would never say that the things I have listed are all
that’s contributed to abandoned properties, nor all that can
or should be done about them. But a truly visionary mayor
who wants to have a lasting effect on the health of the city
overall could do nothing more radical (in its original sense
of getting to the roots) than to go after some of these rules
of the game that make the other approaches so difficult. They’ll
be hard political fights yes, but the good news is, once they’re
taken care of, they won’t require any kind of ongoing management
or funding to have their effect.
Of course, not all rules of the game will be exactly within
the mayor’s scope of duties: Johnson names the reluctance
(mostly of white people) to live in fully integrated neighborhoods
as a primary dynamic underlying urban demographics. That one’s
not up to the policymakers.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
maxel-lute@metroland.net
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