Unzip your mind, and the rest will follow

1. I think, therefore I win

Or so says the logorrheic Malcolm Gladwell, in yet another of his probably-unsound-but-vibrantly-intriguing monologs, as captured in The New Yorker:

The hair has a purpose, doesn’t it?

As novices, we don’t trust our judgment. Then we have some success, and begin to feel a little surer of ourselves. Finally, we get to the top of our game and succumb to the trap of thinking that there’s nothing we can’t master. As we get older and more experienced, we overestimate the accuracy of our judgments, especially when the task before us is difficult and when we’re involved with something of great personal importance.

Is it more confidence in our own accuracy, or just faster pattern recognition and decreased patience with those slower?  As I quoted James Blish in my Ultimate Future City post sequence:

The older a man became, the more quickly he saw answers to tough questions because the more experience he had to bring to bear on them; and the less likely he was to tolerate slow thinking among his associates.  If he were sane, his answers were generally right answers – if he were insane, they were not; but what mattered was the speed of the thinking itself.  In the end, both the sane and the insane became equally dictatorial, less and less ready to explain why they picked on answer over another.  319

Gladwell’s perspective is similar:

The British were overconfident at Gallipoli not because Gallipoli didn’t matter but, paradoxically, because it did; it was a high-stakes contest, of daunting complexity, and it is often in those circumstances that overconfidence takes root.

Dire straits to supporting Russia

Like many Gladwellisms, this one’s a sweeping oversimplification into a single provoking and debatable point.  Gallipoli happened for the same reason the First World War romanticized fighter pilots – with the whole European theater of war a single five-hundred-mile trench of useless stalemated slaughter, naturally any edge initiative assumed inflated importance, as if dog-earing a single page corner could close the book on conflict.

Knights of the air, romanticized in both sets of trenches

This is what social scientists mean when they say that human overconfidence can be an adaptive trait. “In conflicts involving mutual assessment, an exaggerated assessment of the probability of winning increases the probability of winning,” Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, writes. “Selection therefore favors this form of overconfidence.” Winners know how to bluff.

Or is it that winners take more risks?  Aren’t most people excessively risk-averse, particularly as we age?

And who bluffs the best?  The person who, instead of pretending to be stronger than he is, actually believes himself to be stronger than he is.  According to Wrangham, self-deception reduces the chances of “behavioral leakage”; that is, of “inadvertently revealing the truth through an inappropriate behavior.”

It’s not a bluff if you believe it.  The best salesman is one utterly convinced of the worth of what he is selling.

This much is in keeping with what some psychologists have been telling us for years—that it can be useful to be especially optimistic about how attractive our spouse is, or how marketable our new idea is. In the words of the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, humans have an “optimal margin of illusion.”

Don’t bother me with details, I’ll face my illusions

In bridge, there is such a thing as expertise unencumbered by bias.  [Wrong! See below. – Ed.]  That’s because, as the psychologist Gideon Keren points out, bridge involves “related items with continuous feedback.”

Repeated trials sharpen judgment.

It has rules and boundaries and situations that repeat themselves and clear patterns that develop—and when a player makes a mistake of overconfidence he or she learns of the consequences of that mistake almost immediately. In other words, it’s a game.

Evidently Mr. Gladwell has never witnessed a bridge argument, where a husband-wife couple, happily married for forty years or more, intelligently berates each other over team failures occasioned by cooperative lapses.  The better the players, the more vicious the post-mortem.

It’s simple, you’re both idiots, all right?

[In stretching to make reality of his metaphor, Mr. Gladwell overshoots, for bridge is actually a terrible metaphor for 'expertise unencumbered by bias' because it is a game of partial information and player cooperation/ communication.  The better metaphor, with which Mr. Gladwell may be less familiar, is chess, which is a game of perfect information between two players.]

But running an investment bank is not, in this sense, a game: it is not a closed world with a limited set of possibilities. It is an open world where one day a calamity can happen that no one had dreamed could happen, and where you can make a mistake of overconfidence and not personally feel the consequences for years and years—if at all.

Mr. Gladwell’s overshoot has also missed the essential difference between games like bridge and life.  In bridge, feedback is instantaneous and directly impacted by one’s actions; in life games, feedback is subject to lengthy phase delay and the cause-effect links can be obscured. 

Perhaps this is part of why we play games: there is something intoxicating about pure expertise, and the real mastery we can attain around a card table or behind the wheel of a racecar emboldens us when we move into the more complex realms.

It’s even more primal.  People love to win.  Games manufacture opportunities to win while minimizing the real cost of losing.

“I’m good at that. I must be good at this, too,” we tell ourselves, forgetting that in wars and on Wall Street there is no such thing as absolute expertise, that every step taken toward mastery brings with it an increased risk of mastery’s curse.

Here is Gladwell’s real point:

Clear enough for you?

[Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy] Cayne must have come back from the Spingold bridge tournament [a multi-day national championship team event, in which Cayne's team placed high – Ed.] fortified in his belief in his own infallibility. And the striking thing about his conversations with Cohan is that nothing that had happened since seemed to have shaken that belief.

By now Cayne’s absence from the trading floor while Bear burned has been bludgeoned insensible, for it appeals to our sense of nemesis, the titan brought low through the Achilles heel of his own arrogance.  I doubt bridge made him overconfident; if anything, quite the reverse.  In bridge, as in bond trading, ability wins … but only in the long run.  Cards or luck also have a say.

Bear’s real lesson is this: diversify your risk profile.  If you want long run advantages to work for you, make sure you survive until the long run.

Awaken the giant and you may get divorced?

I think, therefore I win.

2. A noble ideal done badly is a bad idea

From a Next Billion conversation with Mo Ibrahim comes this multifaceted nugget (which I’ve reordered for clarity and numbered for reference):

Thinking about the viable business: Mo Ibrahim

[1] Creating jobs and looking after the community are important.  A business cannot thrive in a community that is failing. 

[2] The sole purpose of business is to generate value generally, not just the kind that is social in nature.  As long as the company is ethical, there is social value.

[3] Social value should not be invoked as an excuse to do lousy, unsuccessful business.  Mixing the two is a recipe for disaster. 

What a tangle of intriguing ideas!  The key is Point 3, that altruism is no excuse for incompetence, and that exempting special enterprises from business discipline does them a disservice.  As the risk of indulging in Ibrahim-esque definitions – framing an issue so that the answer is self-evident, even tautological – I agree with what I believe to be Mr. Ibrahim’s dual-edged point:

Arguments cut two ways

1. Profit is social value.  All businesses that provide customer value also generate social benefit as a byproduct.  Even if they give no thought whatsoever to corporate social responsibility, their success strengthens and improves the community in which they operate.

2. Altruism is no free pass.  Avowedly social enterprises can claim no refuge in good intentions if their outputs are miserable (his point 3).

Now, if that’s what Mr. Ibrahim was seeking to say, then I wholly agree, and his perspective encapsulates views I’ve long held. 

Is that what he’s saying?

Contrariwise …

3. Slums, and You Are There

Via Bob Dubinsky of the worthwhile International Housing Coalition comes The Places We Live, a Web site you should visit immediately:

I want to make you aware of an exciting website noted below. www.theplaceswelive.com.  The web address takes you to an Aperture Foundation presentation about what slums are like around the world. The interactive site allows you to hear from slum dwellers what is like to live in slums and you can pan around the interior of slum houses to get a sense of how people live. It is really worth some of your time.

This beautiful and interesting presentation will be installed in the Building Museum in Washington DC by the end of August. It will be sponsored by the Cities Alliance and USAID as a complementary exhibit to World Habitat Day on October 5.

Anyone in Washington DC should visit the Building Museum, which previously hosted a history of American affordable housing, and which is a delightful historical structure in its own right:

)

A seriously cool space in Washington, DC

The Building Museum exhibit graphically makes the case for the work of the IHC. It should help people better understand the importance of investing more foreign aid in urban development and slum improvement. The next few months will be critical in making the case to Congress and the Administration to give more attention to urban development and slum issues. The IHC will continue to play an active role in focusing attention on these issues. We also hope to be involved in the World Habitat Day celebrations.

AHI’s worked with the IHC on several small initiatives; we anticipate doing something with them for World habitat. 

Meanwhile, you can buy the book here.  Both the book and the Web site are highly recommended.

Kibera, where AHI works, from The Places We Live

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The violence appears to be subsiding:

The first thing everyone mentions is the helicopters: the relentless throbbing of blades cutting through the skies above and the probing searchlights that have kept the residents awake over the last four nights.

Helicopter flying over VIlliers

The gunfire that echoed off the walls of the tower blocks in a violent outburst of rioting earlier this week has subsided. 

But the calm, enforced by a thousand officers deployed at sunset every night, had a precarious feel to it today as locals tried to make do with an undeclared state of emergency that has hobbled their daily lives in multiple ways.

“It feels like we live in a war zone,” said Nadege Tanier, a 40-year-old mother of two, as she walked by the burned-out hulk of a garbage truck still reeking of burned tires.

There is no curfew, but few people go out after dark when rows of shielded officers move in to take position around this town.  Buses, a popular target for firebombs in the past, have stopped running in the early evenings, making it hard for people to come home from work.  Many shops lock up hours before their normal closing time, partly for fear of vandalism, partly because few customers dare shop after dark. The Tunisian owner of a local bakery, Habib Friaa, said his staff was baking only half as many baguettes as usual because business had slumped.

Baghdad?  Fallujah?  No, the bucolically misnamed Villiers-le-Bel, France, as reported in last week’s New York Times:

President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned the recent rioting in harsh terms today, blaming what he called a “thugocracy” of criminals for the violence.  “I reject any form of other-worldly naivete that wants to see a victim of society in anyone who breaks the law, a social problem in any riot,” he said in a speech to police officers west of Paris.  “What happened in Villiers-le-Bel has nothing to do with a social crisis. It has everything to do with a ‘thugocracy.’”

M. Sarkozy is correct.

The rioters are utterly confident the police will not fire upon them

But in interviews with residents today, it became plain that there was little sympathy for rioters claiming to seek revenge for their friends’ deaths.

“I don’t like the way police are treating the kids sometimes and I know they have not got many economic opportunities, but there is no excuse for the violence and the destruction,” said Nora Hemmal, a Moroccan immigrant, who had hoped to enroll her 1-year-old daughter next year in the nursery which was destroyed. “Most of us are just caught in the middle.”

I have no sympathy for the rioters’ actions, and every sympathy for their frustrations.  Not only was this entirely predictable, its recurrence is even more predictable. 

Two years ago, suburban Paris went up into a city of flames.  After an orgy-like week of destruction that I wrote about in L’horloge orange, things finally calmed down.

Then what?  As I posted in French urban policy: fixing jobs and houses:

As car torchings taper off due among other things to a substantially increased police presence, President Chirac’s ninety-day extension of the state of emergency has bought the French government a brief respite — but to do what?  In its Charlemagne essay, the Economist nails France’s problem:

But the riots in France point to one particular area in which Europe has been unusually bad: integrating immigrant families from the second and third generations.

Charlemagne accurately describes why:

The second big motor of integration is home-ownership, especially important in the second and third generations.  This gives people a stake in society, something they can lose.  Thanks to cheap mortgages and an advanced banking system, half of Latinos in America own their own homes.  Britain, after its council-house sales and property booms, also encourages house ownership.  In contrast, most of the blocks in the French banlieues are publicly owned. 

Between them, a job and a house help to create not only more integration but also greater social mobility.  Latinos supported America’s turn towards assimilation because they feared the trap of Spanish-language ghettos.  But the banlieues are full of people who have grown up without jobs, or any hope of getting a better income or a better place to live.  For them, integration is a deceit, not a promise.

A job and a house will not solve everything.  The father of one of the July 7th London bombers owned two shops, two houses and a Mercedes.  But if you want to know why second- and third-generation immigrants integrate more in some countries than others, jobs and houses are a good place to start.

Indeed, even President Chirac gets that message, although his approach sounds like so much vaporware. 

What needed to be done?  As I wrote in Fixing French housing policy: tear down the high-rises:

With the violence waning under the heavy sedation of a state of emergency, the French have bought themselves a winter of quiet desperation.  But time is useless … unless one uses it to act.  What is the prescription for fixing France’s bankrupt urban housing policy?

Tear them all down.

Tear down all the high-rises.

Clichy-sous-Bois, the morning after

Not because of the riots, in spite of the riots.

Yet about the French government, I was cynical and skeptical:

Watch the feet, not the hands, coaches intone when they teach basketball defense, because while the hands are where the opponent wants you to look, the body goes where the feet go.

The French riots are a catastrophe, but does the French government see the catastrophe as mainly political (optical) or policy (substantive)?  Or, said more properly, since all government is comprised of self-interested individuals, do French elected officials see the catastrophe in policy terms — the essential precondition of fundamental reform, which in this case means tearing down the hideous high-rises — or merely political ones?

They’re saying the right things:

[French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin] said the government was launching a “very intensive” program to help deprived neighborhoods, including tripling the scholarships to boarding schools given to children from these areas.

Is this political commitment, or political vaporware?  Does the French government tackle its massive problem just with laws, or with money also?  The next few weeks will tell us. 

He said the government wanted to create more tax-free zones in deprived areas, but also wanted people in these areas to accept jobs outside these neighborhoods.

“We need a social mix in order to have a real equilibrium now in our society,” he said.

De Villepin said the government intended to do away with high-rise housing estates, replacing them quickly with smaller scale buildings.

“Do or do not.  There is no try.”

This might make me more optimistic if I were amnesiac.  Here is French President Jacques Chirac, three months ago, long before the riots started:

PARIS — President Jacques Chirac said France must build more public housing and renovate crumbling apartment buildings, an urgent response to three fires that recently burned through run-down Paris lodgings and killed scores of African immigrants.

Police, meanwhile, were preparing to evacuate the capital’s most dilapidated apartment buildings and havens for squatters this week.

At a Cabinet meeting, Chirac told Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to draw up plans to renovate run-down apartment buildings — a response to the blazes that killed a total of 48 people since spring, most of them African immigrants.

Promises, promises, wave the hands, but what are the feet doing?   What action is the French government taking?

Evidently, a fair bit, as reported in the Economist:

Local (mainly Socialist) mayors have been giving warning for a while that, two years on, tensions remain high. Not that these grim neighbourhoods have been neglected. They have had a huge injection of public cash, primarily for the renovation of the housing projects that ring the big cities. Tower blocks have been demolished, streets have been relaid and lighting has been improved.

Even so, the two biggest problems in these neighbourhoods remain. The first is the failure of the French economy to create enough jobs. Unemployment in what officialdom coyly calls “sensitive urban areas” is twice the national average; on the worst estates, it can hit 40%. Mr Sarkozy wants to loosen the labour market to encourage job creation, but negotiations with unions are still in progress.

As the New York Times reported it:

The events of the past three days, set off by the deaths of two teenagers whose minibike collided with a police vehicle on Sunday, make clear that the underlying causes of frustration and anger — particularly among unemployed, undereducated youths, mostly the offspring of Arab and African immigrants — remain the same.

“We have heard promise after promise, but nothing has been done in the suburbs since the last riots, nothing,” said François Pupponi, the Socialist mayor of Sarcelles, which has been struck by the violence, in an interview.  “The suburbs are like tinderboxes. You have people in terrible social circumstances, plus all the rage, plus all the hate, plus all the rumors, and all you need is one spark to set them on fire.”

One random incident strikes the spark

In the wake of the unrest in 2005, the government of then-President Jacques Chirac (with Nicolas Sarkozy, now the president, as the tough, law-and-order interior minister) announced measures to improve life in the suburbs, including extra money for housing, schools and neighborhood associations, as well as counseling and job training for unemployed youths.  None has gone very far.

While M. Sarkozy is not blameless, responsibility rests with the execrable Chirac (who, by the way, is now virtually under indictment for bribery).

A little over a month ago, fire consumed a large swath of greater San Diego.

The cause may have been frivolous arson, but the cause doesn’t matter.  Alter the environment, dry it out of its natural relief, and it becomes dry and brittle, ready to go up at a spark. 

Put human beings in wretched conditions, package them in concrete boxes, toss in subsidy and ignore their aspirations, render them impotent and idle, and as a final provocation, give them cell phones and televisions and internet so they can see just how excluded they are.  Rage grows in the slums inside as surely as California’s sirocco dries leaves into tinder.  Give it a match, and up it goes.

Unless France urgently, urgently makes vast changes, Villiers-le-Bel will be just the prelude.  As Villiers-le-Bel was more vicious, more destructive, more organized, more deadly than Clichy-sous-Bois, whatever banlieue goes up next will be even worse.  The French urban phony war is giving way to ongoing urban insurrection.

In his six months as president, [Sarkozy] has largely focused on injecting new life into France’s flaccid economy through creating jobs and lowering taxes and consumer prices.

Unfortunately, the government factory can manufacture Product 1 (laws) faster than it manufactures Product 2 (money), even though Product 2 is more helpful than Product 1.

His most notable initiative in dealing with youth crime has been punitive: the passage of a law last July that required a minimum sentence for repeat offenders and in many cases allowed minors between 16 and 18 years old to be tried and sentenced as adults.

Still, there appears to be a renovation plan in the works.  As the Economist puts it:

Mr Sarkozy, who was demonised in the banlieues during the election campaign for his harsh anti-immigrant stance, appointed a left-wing Muslim woman, Fadela Amara, as a minister to deal with the inner cities.  By including her, as well as others from ethnic minorities, in government, he sent a message of inclusion to the heavily Muslim suburbs.

And the Times adds:

Since September, Fadela Amara, his outspoken junior minister charged with drawing up a policy for the suburbs, has been holding town hall meetings throughout France in preparation for what is to be a “Marshall Plan” for the suburbs.

Let’s hope that it’s in time and substantive.

General Marshall announced the Plan at Harvard Commencement, 1947, 2½ years after V-E Day

“We’ve been talking about a Marshall Plan for the suburbs since the early 1990s,” said Adil Jazouli, a sociologist who focuses on the suburbs. “We don’t need poetry. We don’t need reflection. We need money.”

What do you think the Marshall Plan was?

Rebuiling Germany one buck at a time

Critics of the Sarkozy government complain that many areas in the suburbs are without a police presence, and that the only time there is a show of security is after violence erupts.

“Sarkozy promised to send more police to the suburbs, but in so many places there are fewer police than there were two years ago,” said Mohamed Hamidi, the French founder of Bondy Blog, a popular political blog created in the Paris suburb of Bondy after the outbreak of violence in 2005. “He didn’t keep his word. Who suffers from all the violence and the burning cars? The people who live in these neighborhoods.”

In 1963, American author James Baldwin wrote his manifesto of outrage, The Fire Next Time. 

James Baldwin

It was his eloquent plea for change, both from American blacks and from American society:

Baldwin advises his nephew on how to deal with the racist world in which he was born. In spite the horrors of America, Baldwin believed the Negro must take the high road and show whites, in their ignorance and innocence, how to live the good life, how to love. 

It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest since Homer.

One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

“My dungeon shook, and my chains fell off.”

Watts, 1965: when rioting made the cover

Baldwin’s plea was timely, but action did not arrive until after America’s cities went up three years running, in 1965, 1966, and 1967.  I still remember the horror of watching burning cities on black-and-white television from one’s living room.  Only then was there change in American urban housing policy.

Mr. Sarkozy has less than two years.  I hope he uses the time well.

The clock is ticking

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The French riots are a catastrophe, but does the French government see the catastrophe as mainly political (optical) or policy (substantive)?  Or, said more properly, since all government is comprised of self-interested individuals, do French elected officials see the catastrophe in policy terms — the essential precondition of fundamental reform, which in this case means tearing down the hideous high-rises — or merely political ones?

They’re saying the right things:

[French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin] said the government was launching a “very intensive” program to help deprived neighborhoods, including tripling the scholarships to boarding schools given to children from these areas.

Is this political commitment, or political vaporware?

The next few weeks will tell us.  As I wrote last summer, government is a factory …

… that manufactures only two products:

·         Laws.  Rules, regulations, boundaries, and typically variations of thou shalt not.

·         Money.  Programs, subsidies, incentives, variations of we will pay you if.

(Hot air, which government produces in bulk, is merely an accidental byproduct.)

If you have only two tools in your toolbox, then no matter the problem, by definition they are the only solutions you can offer:

·         “Let’s make the problem illegal.”

·         “Let’s give somebody a lot of money to make the problem go away.”

Of these two, from the perspective of an elected official, one is much more appealing.  Money is finite; spend it on one thing and it is unavailable for another.  But laws are open-ended; you can always make more. 

Does the French government tackle its massive problem just with laws, or with money also?  One can go either way, either an Augustinian pessimist or Pelagian optimist:

French politicians have split their responses between calling for improvements in the living conditions in those neighborhoods, populated mainly by immigrants and their French-born offspring, and blaming the residents there for bringing social problems on themselves by refusing to integrate into French society.

“We are well known for our cheerful accommodating attitude to people who pronounce French badly.”

And what is the French government doing?  Here’s what the hands are doing:

He said the government wanted to create more tax-free zones in deprived areas, but also wanted people in these areas to accept jobs outside these neighborhoods.

“We need a social mix in order to have a real equilibrium now in our society,” he said.

De Villepin said the government intended to do away with high-rise housing estates, replacing them quickly with smaller scale buildings.

“Do or do not.  There is no try.”

This might make me more optimistic if I were amnesiac.  Here is French President Jacques Chirac, three months ago, long before the riots started:

PARIS — President Jacques Chirac said France must build more public housing and renovate crumbling apartment buildings, an urgent response to three fires that recently burned through run-down Paris lodgings and killed scores of African immigrants.

Police, meanwhile, were preparing to evacuate the capital’s most dilapidated apartment buildings and havens for squatters this week.

At a Cabinet meeting, Chirac told Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to draw up plans to renovate run-down apartment buildings — a response to the blazes that killed a total of 48 people since spring, most of them African immigrants.

“You can see how substantial is my commitment to this issue …”

Promises, promises, wave the hands, but what are the feet doing? 

“I’ve never seen these feet before in my life!”

What action is the French government taking?

PARIS, Nov. 29 — The French government Tuesday proposed tightening immigration controls to make it more difficult for foreign students and foreign-born relatives of French residents to enter the country. The plan was fueled by concern over unrest in immigrant neighborhoods, the scene recently of three weeks of street violence.

At the same time, the lower house of Parliament overwhelmingly approved new anti-terrorism laws that would allow increased video surveillance in public places and tougher monitoring of international travel by French citizens.

So the first responses are two laws, one on the books to be more enforced this time, the other about to be:

[1] The government’s proposed law, which de Villepin said would be submitted to Parliament next year, would make it more difficult for French residents and citizens to bring foreign spouses into the country and require longer waiting periods for legal immigrants to apply for visas for their spouses and children. Legal immigrants would be required to be able to speak French before family members could join them in France.

[2] The new anti-terrorism measure, strengthening laws that are already among the toughest in Europe, passed the lower house 373 to 27. “We must give greater powers to law enforcement to avoid a catastrophe,” Sarkozy told the National Assembly. The bill now goes to the Senate, where analysts predict it will pass, probably next year.

Under the draft law, certain buildings, including department stores, mosques and synagogues, could be equipped with surveillance cameras. Aides to Sarkozy say he embraced the measure after seeing how effective video recordings had been in helping British authorities identify the subway bombers.

Laws are essential; anarchic violence and gratuitous vandalism cannot be tolerated.  But if all you do is call out the riot cops, impose the state of emergency, and pepper the concrete canyons with surveillance, you have made of a neighborhood a prison without law, without justice, without sentence, without parole.

Without hope.

Let’s leave with some unintentionally damning words:

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told Parliament on Tuesday that France did not want “those people that nobody else in the world wants.”  He added, “We want selective immigration.”

If you see the riots as the fault of ‘those people’, you will never see it as your responsibility to help them.

And they will never see it as their responsibility to be citizens.

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Interesting definition of ‘normality’

So what is the prescription for fixing France’s bankrupt urban housing policy?

Paris public housing high-rises

Tear them all down.

Tear down all the high-rises.

Clichy-sous-Bois, the morning after

Not because of the riots, in spite of the riots.

In a lengthy New York Times Magazine article, Christopher Caldwell gets it right:

There is a somewhat comic lining around the cloud of France’s suburban riots. Suddenly the word banlieue has been embraced by people not known for peppering their conversation with French words – callers to right-wing talk shows, for instance. Obviously, they want to stress how different those suburbs (burning cars and hip-hop hand gestures) are from our own (swing sets and Weber grills).

European politicians, anxious lest their countries be perceived as “the next France,” have made a similar point. Wolfgang Schauble, a prominent German Christian Democrat, said recently, “We do not have these gigantic high-rise projects that they have on the edge of French cities.”

[…]

[In] most French cities, the urban core is made up of neatly tended architectural treasures and the disorder is pushed to the periphery. [Marseilles] is turned inside out, so that “inner city” and “suburbia” retain their American connotations. That may have spared Marseille a lot of problems.

La crise des banlieues turns out to be an ambiguous phrase.  Is there a problem in France’s suburbs or with France’s suburbs?  For Schauble, it’s the buildings. For the boosters of Marseille, it’s where you put them.

It’s the buildings.

The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, as Francophobes have been more than ready to explain, bears some of the blame for both. His designs inspired many of the suburbs where the riots of October and November began. In fact, he inspired the very practice of housing the urban poor by building up instead of out. Soaring apartments, he thought, would finally give sunlight and fresh air to city laborers, who had been trapped in narrow and fetid back streets since the dawn of urbanization.

Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation (a “unit of habitation”)

But high-rise apartments mixed badly with something poor communities generate in profusion: groups of young, armed, desperate males.

The young males needn’t be desperate, merely bored and testosterone-driven. 

Anyone who could control the elevator bank (and, when that became too terrifying to use, the graffiti-covered stairwells) could hold hundreds of families ransom.

Right.  In ergonomic terms, an apartment is:

A secure personal space.

Within a larger complex.

Reached through public areas.

What always dooms low-income high-rises is that third element: you cannot secure the public space.  Not economically, and therefore not in practice.  Only the people themselves secure the public space: what Jane Jacobs called ‘eyes on the street’:

Jacobs focused on sidewalks and city streets, human activity, and human watchfulness. A street needs three qualities to be safe, she said: a clear demarcation between public space and private space, “eyes upon the street,” and sidewalks in continuous use. Constant activity adds to the number of effective eyes on the street, she said, because it induces people in nearby buildings to watch the sidewalks.

When you enclose public space — such as in an elevator, a stairwell, or a long high-rise corridor — you create an environment that not only can be unsafe, it will be unsafe.  Nearly thirty years ago, Oscar Newman wrote in his seminal work, Defensible Space (1973), later updated in Creating Defensible Space.  As Newman wrote (1996):

A family’s claim to a territory diminishes proportionally as the number of families who share that claim increases.  The larger the number of people who share a territory, the less each individual feels rights to it.  Therefore, with only a few families sharing an area, whether it be the interior circulation areas of a building or the grounds outside, it is relatively easy for an informal understanding to be reached among the families as to what constitutes acceptable usage.

When the numbers increase, the opportunity for reaching such an implicit understanding diminishes to the point that no usage other than walking through the area is really possible, but any use is permissible. 

It is easier for outsiders to gain access to and linger in the interior areas of a building shared by 24 to 100 families that it is in a building shared by 6 to 12 families.

– Pages 17-18

Riot cop, Le Blanc-Mesnil

Back in the late 1970s, when I was just embarking on my glorious career in affordable housing, we were involved with a property known as Walden Square Apartments, a bizarre concatenation of a high-rise surrounded by very large walkup family apartment flats.  To get to the low-rise, you had to walk through the high-rise, where all the mailboxes were located, so there were entirely legitimate reasons for anyone to loiter anywhere. 

Young singles and elderly lived in the high-rise, welfare families in the low-rise.  So the teenage sons of the latter preyed upon the former, a predator-prey ecosystem that no amount of cameras, security guards, management supervision, or residency handbooks could arrest.  I remember riding those hideous elevators, their cabs painted with multiple layers of bright red enamel nevertheless scratched with obscene graffiti, and walking down urine-smelling corridors.  The space, in short, was not defensible. 

In the end, our management company reoriented the complex into two different entrances, one for the high-rise, one for the low-rise, effectively severing its corpus callosum and creating the schism of two outwardly facing properties each oblivious to the other. 

Janus was the Roman god of gates and doors

Our experiment in cross-generational cohabitation was over. 

France has never learned this most basic of urban-dwelling lessons:

Le Corbusier called houses “machines for living.” France’s housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation. In theory, the cause of this alienation is some mix of the buildings themselves and the way they’re joined to the city. But in practice, the most effective urban renewal has tended to focus on the buildings. It focuses on the buildings by razing them.

This too is a lesson we learned in the US, the hard way.  In 1950, on the banks of the Mississippi River in downtown St. Louis, we cleared a decaying industrial slum and built Pruitt-Igoe, the archetypal urban high-rise, a city unto itself. 

Pruitt-Igoe, under construction (1951)

Pruitt-Igoe, completed (1955)

I was able to witness the newly constructed 2,740 unit public housing high-rise development Pruitt-Igoe, go to ruin.  The project was designed by one of the country’s most eminent architects and was hailed as the new enlightenment.  It followed the planning principles of Le Corbusier and the Internati8onal Congress of Modern Architects.  Even though the density was not very high [for a high-rise. -- Ed], residents were raised into the air in 11-story buildings.  The idea was to keep the grounds and the first floor free for community activity.  “A river of trees” was to flow under the buildings.  Each building was given communal corridors on every third floor to house a laundry, a communal room, and a garbage room that contained a garbage chute.

– Oscar Newman, Creating Defensible Space, pages 9-10

Pruitt-Igoe, its own community (1955)

Pruitt-Igoe, isolated but visible

With a few years, the architectural theories were on their way to ruin:

The areas proved unsafe.  The river of trees soon became a sewer of glass and garbage.  The mailboxes on the ground floor were vandalized.  The corridors, lobbies, elevators and stairs were dangerous places to walk.  They became covered with graffiti and littered with garbage and human waste.

The elevators, laundry, and community rooms were vandalized, and garbage was stacked high around the choked garbage chutes.  Women had to get together in groups to take their children to school and go shopping.  The project never achieved more than 60% occupancy.

– Newman, ibid., page 10

Pruitt-Igoe, a third floor communal corridor as it actually turned out.

By 1972 Pruitt-Igoe had become such a slum inside that we tore it down.

Pruitt-Igoe, demolition 1972

Pruitt-Igoe, demolition 1972

The lesson we learned, the Dutch have also learned — the hard way:

Amsterdam and Rotterdam stand in the same urban-planning relationship as Paris and Marseille. The core of golden-age buildings along Amsterdam’s canals are surrounded by industrial-age apartments and then by a fan of housing projects. Rotterdam, because it was rebuilt after heavy bombing in World War II, has big concentrations of poor and working-class people, many of them immigrants and their children, living in the bull’s-eye of the metropolitan area.

Yet the cities’ redevelopment policies are virtually identical. Both are well into a headlong retreat from gigantism and uniformity. The notorious high rises of De Bijlmer in southeastern Amsterdam were completed only in 1975 but were soon generating the kind of pathology on display in the banlieues. 

De Bijlmer, Amsterdam

Words fail at imagining who could have inflicted such sterility upon people.

A succession of Labor mayors have presided over their dismantling to make way for smaller “garden houses.” When the city determined that 11,000 units of housing were needed in the Nieuw West area, it decided to demolish 13,000 units and build 24,000 on a more neighborly scale, to avoid what Cohen calls “huge, stretched-out deprived areas.”

In right-wing Rotterdam, meanwhile, Pastors has done almost exactly the same thing. He poured resources into mixed-income projects started by the Labor Party in the once-dismal neighborhood of Bospolder-Tussendijken and added others of his own. His reasoning is the same as Cohen’s. Both argue for maximum residential diversity on the grounds that people now have “housing careers.”

Why emphasize residential diversity?  Mr. Caldwell has it right:

In the old days, the argument runs, a person with a working-class identity could live in “working-class housing.” But today people have housing careers that vary as much as their professional ones. When they are young and not terribly bothered by noise, they might choose small, functional places close to cultural attractions and nightlife. They can move to larger, quieter ones when they have families and then trade space for comfort when their children leave home. Corbusier-style city planning shows no evidence of having considered this.

If you don’t vary the housing units in a given neighborhood – if you fill entire quarters of the city with standard-issue monoliths – you condemn upwardly mobile people to constant movement. The only people who develop any sense of place are those trapped in the poverty they started in.

Multiple uses, multiple tenures, multiple configurations within the same neighborhood.  All this is essential to healthy communities.  Neighborhood ecosystemic diversity is thus not a luxury but rather an essential feature of systemic robustness and continuing vitality.

Monolithic structures are suitable only for clones. 

High-rise public housing never works.  Never has worked, never will work. 

Pruitt-Igoe, vandalized (circa 1968)

Pruitt-Igoe, being depopulated (circa 1968)

Tear them all down and build proper communities, with lower density, low-rise, mixed use, and mixed income.

Messieurs Chirac, de Villepin and Sarkozy: tear down the banlieues. 

“Dominique, you tear down the high-rises.”

“Non, non, mon cher Nicolas, apres vous!”

The cost will be mammoth.  It will be far beyond anything the French government can possibly imagine.  Affordable housing always costs money.  And the housing cost, huge though it will be, will be only one strategic intervention in a complex multi-activity interdependent solution (jobs and cultural assimilation are two other critical elements).

But unless and until you reinvent your housing, messieurs, everything else you try will fail.

Tear down the high-rises.  Tear them all down.

Pruitt-Igoe, demolition 1972

Tear them down now.

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As car torchings taper off due among other things to a substantially increased police presence …

The chart is out of date: just under 10,000 cars torched but a continuing downward trend 

… President Chirac’s ninety-day extension of the state of emergency has bought the French government a brief respite — but to do what?  In its Charlemagne essay, the Economist nails France’s problem:

But the riots in France point to one particular area in which Europe has been unusually bad: integrating immigrant families from the second and third generations.

Chart from the Boston Globe

Charlemagne accurately describes why:

So even if immigrants in Europe raise cultural barriers to assimilation, this is hardly unique.  What matters are the forces that work to overcome those barriers.  Two stand out: work and home-ownership.

The work advantage

Work is the archetypal social activity.  It provides friends and contacts beyond your family or ethnic group.  If you start your own company, it pulls you further into the society around you.  And here is a striking difference between Europe and America.  Unemployment in France is almost 10%.  Among immigrants or the children of immigrants, it is at least twice [20%] and sometimes four times as high [40%].  In contrast, unemployment among legal immigrants in America is negligible, and business ownership is off the scale compared with Europe.

The second big motor of integration is home-ownership, especially important in the second and third generations.  This gives people a stake in society, something they can lose.  Thanks to cheap mortgages and an advanced banking system, half of Latinos in America own their own homes.  Britain, after its council-house sales and property booms, also encourages house ownership.  In contrast, most of the blocks in the French banlieues are publicly owned. 

Between them, a job and a house help to create not only more integration but also greater social mobility.  Latinos supported America’s turn towards assimilation because they feared the trap of Spanish-language ghettos.  But the banlieues are full of people who have grown up without jobs, or any hope of getting a better income or a better place to live.  For them, integration is a deceit, not a promise.

A job and a house will not solve everything.  The father of one of the July 7th London bombers owned two shops, two houses and a Mercedes.  But if you want to know why second- and third-generation immigrants integrate more in some countries than others, jobs and houses are a good place to start.

Indeed, even President Chirac gets that message, although his approach sounds like so much vaporware:

“We will respond by being firm, by being fair and by being faithful to the values of France,” Chirac said in his first televised address to the nation on unrest by youths in poor suburbs over racism, a lack of jobs and a sense of exclusion.

Chirac, who has been under fire for saying little during the crisis, also announced the creation of a voluntary task force to help young people find work. He said it would provide training for 50,000 young people in 2007.

This is a start … but both Chirac and Charlemagne stop short of tackling the tough question:

How can the French banlieues be transformed into healthy communities?

Before we can tackle the prescription, we must also answer this question:

How and why did the banlieues become such ghettos?

I’ll deal with both of these in future posts. 

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