The Importance of Narrative

Reading the outstanding Atlantic magazine recently, I came across an article by James Fallows that focused on the revival efforts of small cities. Although Fallows had a number of take-home points and examples, I honed in on one that rang true to me: the stories we tell ourselves matter. These stories matter for our own lives. New psychological approaches highlight how important autobiographical narratives are for shaping our personalities—even that these narratives are our personality.

Well take that to the community level, then. The narratives that we form as neighbors, neighborhoods, as cities, they all come together to actually define the personality of an urban area. And that means that a good story, a powerful narrative of progress and potential, can be self-fulfilling.

I think these are good lessons to keep in mind for any urban area. But perhaps it’s most important for those struggling to redefine their place in the new century and to cope with legacy challenges.

Fallows was visiting Eastport, Maine, a town of only 1500. He describes the people as “telling their own success story, as part of willing it to come true.” The residents were engaged throughout the town—the newspaper editor pulls tickets at the play—and defined largely by their optimism and the drive to achieve their goals.

Importantly, the town is moving forward, not longing for the good ol’ days. Although they are continuing to use their natural strengths and resources, like a deep harbor, the residents are moving with the economic tide as well. Farmed salmon are replacing overfished stocks. The European demand for low-carbon fuels is driving a huge export in natural charcoal. New technologies allow Eastport to capture energy from the daily tides in and out of the harbor. They are a port town, and that will never change. But the residents have found ways to capitalize on those resources in innovative ways.

Fallows returns to this point about narrative. The cynic could ask: Can it possibly matter? With ever-increasing globalization, even local economies are largely defined by supply and demand around the world. Cities rise and fall and that cannot be stopped by a cheerful smile. Of course, that’s all true.

However, Fallows writes, “the story [Eastport] is telling itself, that it is poised for success, makes that success more likely.” The narrative shapes the character of the town even before the ending is known. “This faith also improves life today, no matter where it leads, or doesn’t, tomorrow.” Would you rather live in a dreary city that is hopelessly losing itself to uncontrollable economic forces? Or a scrappy town, pushing innovative ways to move forward in the 21^st century. I know I’d chose the latter.

Even the cynic would have a hard time arguing with Fallows: “In practical terms, a belief that you can shape your fate is more useful than a belief that you cannot.” Let’s tell ourselves the good story. Let’s expound our optimistic, but grounded, narrative of improvement. Let’s make today better, and tomorrow’s improvement more likely. Stories matter. They matter to us, and to our cities. Might as well choose the one with a happy ending.

The Apotheosis of St. Louis

I spent the last few days proselytizing for St. Louis to the prospective graduate students interviewing at Washington University. Our program in plant biology is top notch, but sometimes our location in the Midwest, and in St. Louis in particular, weakens our offer to recruits. Not surprisingly, I’m an advocate for the character of St. Louis that I feel shines through after just a modicum of time spent looking. The old French parts of town. The separate neighborhoods that together make a community. The brick. The beer. Oh the beer! St. Louis turns 250 this year and in honor of that milestone and to solidify my arguments for STL I want to discuss the city’s strong qualities, its faults, and where I hope to see it go in the future.

Like any city, St. Louis is really comprised of a series of sometimes-distinct, sometimes-overlapping neighborhoods. And, like any city, this provides strength through diversity, but also a sense of isolation for particular neighborhoods that are trapped by blight. St. Louis is a relatively old city in the American interior, and the French roots that define our founding anchor the city in traditions and culture that enrich it. The farther east you go toward the Mississippi, the more apparent these French roots are in the architecture and culture.

Traveling west moves you forward in time. Through the Louisiana Purchase to Victorian era architecture and the 1904 World’s Fair that formed Forest Park and the final neighborhoods within the city limits. This geography-time link provides ample history to explore; all you have to do is point yourself in a direction and bring a sense of curiosity.

I feel that the neighborhood divisions make it easy to explore the richness and diversity of St. Louis. When you move to a new city, grappling with the new culture and finding the best places is a daunting task. But once you have a feel for the layout of the neighborhoods, the prospect of exploration becomes manageable. Feel like Italian food? Hit up The Hill. Bar hopping on brick-paved streets? Head to Soulard. St. Louis is a surprisingly bike-friendly city as well. If you make it to the middle of the city, you’ll find yourself about a 15 minute bike ride from everywhere.

What else sets St. Louis apart? Excellent public transportation. A surprising abundance of urban community gardens. A craft beer culture that rivals larger beer cities. A Midwestern sense of friendliness that builds communities. And the Cardinals.

St. Louis has to grapple with enormous challenges too. The population of the city declined again from 2000 to 2010, even though the Downtown population continued to grow at a strong clip. There is pervasive racial and socioeconomic segregation. Barely-accredited public schools limit the city population’s opportunities and push those with means out to the suburbs. The relationship between the City of St. Louis and its suburbs is another obstacle facing the region.

In 1876, the city of St. Louis voted to emancipate itself from the surrounding county and form an independent city. The city residents wanted to keep the county from siphoning tax revenue away from the urban core. 

The legacy of that decision remains today. The county is comprised of dozens of small “cities” each with their own municipal services, while the city suffers for lack of funds. Proposals to reunite the communities have been put forward for years, but have gone nowhere. This leaves the county municipalities needlessly duplicating services and keeps major sources of tax revenue potentially out of city coffers. Perhaps more importantly, it divides the region into city-versus-county debates that fragment the population.

To move forward and prosper in the 21^st century, St. Louis has to address—at least—three major challenges: reunification of city and county, attracting young people, and reducing segregation.

Reunification will produce a region united in recruiting new businesses (instead of a competing with neighbors through tax incentives). City and county residents will have the incentive to plan for the future of the region rather than just focusing on their neighborhood. Although I am a proud resident of the City and a proponent for the benefits of an urban experience, I support reunification to unite these communities in moving forward.

Just like our graduate program, St. Louis needs to attract and hold on to the young people who will move into—and stay in—the city and boost the economy. St. Louis hosts a burgeoning technology hub that is poised to attract the kind of talent looking for alternatives to Silicon Valley. Our cost of living is very modest. We claim a number of top universities and companies that already attract bright and talented people who are starting their education and careers.

St. Louis can hold on to this population by developing communities that support a work-life balance. That means being able to commute without a car and walk to find daily necessities. It means developing communities around common spaces and common interests. Perhaps most importantly, it means having good school options so that the brightest people who come to live and work in St. Louis don’t bolt for the county as soon as kindergarten rolls around.

Finally, the segregation that divides North and South City (and other areas as well) really limits the potential of St. Louis. Unfortunately, this is a topic about which I need to learn a lot more. I am not an economist, nor a sociologist, nor an urban planner. But I know that the Delmar Divide has been profiled on a British news show, and that’s not a good claim to fame. Improving schools, improving economic opportunities, and distributing the growth of the region evenly will move the region forward as a whole. This challenge is perhaps the greatest one, and undoubtedly will require creative solutions addressing many problems from multiple angles.

St. Louis probably won’t be my home forever. I want to see so many other places in this country (and maybe even a few outside of it) that I doubt I will remain in STL for more than a handful of years. However, I have adopted St. Louis very quickly as my home. We fit together. I always tell my friends that I thought I liked Cleveland (and I did!) until I came to St. Louis. I want to see the city grow and thrive. And I want to see people—especially my generation—give St. Louis a chance to make them feel at home as well. 

The Apotheosis of St. Louis

The Changing and Static Nature of GMO Coverage

Over the last couple of years, I have noticed two simultaneous trends about media coverage of GMOs. First, a larger proportion of GMO stories highlight and dispute popular myths surrounding GMOs. Second, the comments on these articles and reasons given to be skeptical or wary of GMOs have not appreciably changed.

A recent New York Times article covered a Hawaiian County Councilman’s decision over a vote to ban GMOs on the big island of Hawaii. Although it was oddly somewhat child-like in its presentation of the process (Claim A is brought up. Claim A is disputed. Claim B is considered. Claim B is disregarded…) the tone of the piece was clearly intended to highlight the value of scientific skepticism. That the councilman, Greggor Ilagan, voted against the ban because it was founded on specious arguments portrayed him as a free thinker among a populism-driven council. Naturally, his side lost and the ban was put into effect.

Many of the comments on the NYTimes article mirrored those of the supporters who attended the council hearings in Hawaii. A minority defend GMOs as safe and useful tools. The majority, however, assert their beliefs that GMOs harm their health or their environment.  Anti-GMO positions usually fall into a few categories: Concerns over the health and safety of eating GMOs. Skepticism of biotech companies (read: Monsanto). Ecological concerns. The benefits of alternative agricultural practices. I hope to spend time with each of these topics over the coming weeks and months. Most are blown out of proportion; many are unfounded. Some, however, do come down to personal stance and belief.

The recent changes in GMO coverage appear to stem from a desire by news organizations to avoid false balance. The standard journalistic practice of neutrally informing the public of both sides of an argument is only valid when there are two even sides. When consensus has yet to be reached. When opinions, morals, or ethics are at stake more than facts. The difficult part of covering GMOs as a topic is that this technology encompasses both broad scientific consensus about its safety and opinions about the proper use of GMOs in agriculture. (And that’s all before we get into misconceptions of the facts that influence people’s opinions.) It is difficult to adequately address these different aspects of the public debate surrounding GMOs because they really lie on different planes.

Plant scientists won’t rest easy until wishy-washy opinions stop influencing scientific policy. GMO skeptics won’t be satisfied as long as their opinions are tossed out even once the facts are agreed upon (which, by the way, rarely happens).

New technologies are messy. My view is that a technological advance is neutral. Our applications of a new technology can be positive or negative. We can split the atom and incinerate cities or fuel them. GMOs have been used fairly conservatively thus far and yet through a combination of pretty terrible PR from biotech companies, an anti-corporate mood throughout the country, and public skepticism driven partly by a false dichotomy between natural and artificial, they remain a pariah in the public eye. Hell, at the end of the day, some would-be opponents say it doesn't even matter. (But ssshhh, don’t tell the commenters that).

The debate surrounding GMOs has lately been described as the left’s own version of climate science denial. Sometimes I use that analogy when trying to drive home how one cannot rely on intuition when assessing a new technology. One has to seek out the facts. Certainly no political party is immune to anti-scientific bias and the progressive left has taken up anti-GMO stances for years now. There is no need to equate GMOs and climate change. But there are similarities in the process by which both global warming and agricultural GMOs are attacked. And process matters.

My own anecdotal contribution to this layman’s media coverage comes from Reddit. Reddit, popularly understood to be largely made up of young, white progressives from North America, has taken a rabid anti-GMO stance for years. (The voting system of Reddit allows one to determine which opinions are most popular, reddiquette be damned.) I've often joined these comment threads to defend the benefits of GMOs or point our popular misconceptions about the technology. Usually I am called out a shill for Monsanto. Lovely.

But over the last couple of years, the top comments have increasingly pointed out misconceptions, biases and untruths in the primary article. More reasonable discussions about the benefits and dangers of GMOs have, slowly, beaten out the vitriol. Perhaps the broader shifts in media coverage of GMOs are in fact slowly trickling through the internet and end up as slightly-more-nuanced discussions rather than ad hominem attacks. If only we could get On The Media to be as interested in this particular topic as they are in asserting that NPR isn't biased!

P.S. If Nathanael Johnson at Grist hadn't beaten me to it, a six month adventure of teasing apart the incredibly intricate issues surrounding GMOs would be right up my alley. I’m still catching up with the coverage, but what I've seen so far suggests it is well worth a read. Check it out.   

  

Urban, Part One: Urban Humanism

I am a city dweller. I am a proud resident of the City of St. Louis, and a defender of the promise and potential of American cities. There’s a complex story being told in magazines and blogs about the future of the City in this century. The story involves demographics, loosely defined generations, the aftermath of the Great Recession and much more besides. This is a story I hope to contribute to one piece at a time. So, in Part One, I’ll begin with a healthy dose of optimism—perhaps a touch of naivety—and apparently not-quite-coining a phrase that appears most popularly associated with an Italian artist. Without spelling it out until this article, I’ve lately been calling myself an Urban Humanist (mostly in my head to avoid difficult questions and funny looks). Here’s my first attempt at defining what Urban Humanism means to me. Okay, to avoid too much pretension, we’ll skip the capital letters.

Let’s start simple. “Urban” refers to cities, obviously. Here we run up against a difficult question already. What is a city? When I think and speak of cities I refer primarily to urban cores, although in the vernacular it could refer to the core plus inner- and maybe even outer-ring suburbs. City limits sometimes extend too far, and other times not far enough. The urban core is an interconnected commercial and residential mix, with a significant increase in population density over outlying suburbs. To me, the central identifier of a city is that it pushes a large mass of diverse people into a small space. Naturally, this defies strict definitions, but fortunately it’s a concept most people can intuit.

“Humanism” is a broad term that can refer to many different approaches to life, and has complex philosophical definitions. I am borrowing what I consider the ‘spirit’ of humanism, which, as Wikipedia so eloquently puts it, “emphasizes the value and agency of human beings.” ‘Agency’ is such a beautiful word. It conjures up free will, moral action and motivation, all wonderfully human qualities.

There is often an explicitly secular component to humanism that rejects religious doctrine and the supernatural. I mostly want to borrow from this secularism the general belief that, as humans, we have to rely on ourselves to fix the problems we make and improve our own condition. To me, humanism extols the virtue of community and individuality. It celebrates the human spirit, ingenuity and drive, while promoting honest and emotional connections between peers.

My urban humanism is focused on the ability of cities to bring diverse groups of people together in order to create a sense of purpose, community and individual opportunity. Urban humanism to me is the product of, among other things, the superlinear scaling of cities. That is, the sum of an urban core is greater than its parts. Literally. The innovation, ideas, productivity (and crime) all scale faster than population itself would predict. Double the population of an urban core, and GDP will more than double.

The proposed cause of urban superlinearity is the ability to form more social ties with a diverse group of people. The Brownian motion of urban life bumps you into individuals you would never have met otherwise. You can exchange ideas, business plans, information or just pleasantries with a wide range of people. And this is the fuel that drives innovation. These interactions—fleeting and long-lasting—are the raw material of humanity. Of progress.

Urban humanism is the doctrine that these interactions promote the value and agency of human beings. Urban humanism posits that urban living will improve our ability to solve problems facing city-dwellers and farmers alike. Denser populations lead to an exchange of ideas that will move humanity forward faster than isolated, sprawled-out communities will. Simultaneously, urban humanism defends the benefits of diverse experiences for personal fulfillment.

As of 2010, a majority of the world’s population lives incities. For the first time ever, humanity is, on average, urban. And this trend will continue. Barring catastrophe, human beings have now progressed beyond a largely rural existence. That means that our future is inextricably tied to how our cities evolve, how we shape them, and how we respond to urban life. I find that prospect absolutely thrilling! I will continue to explore the realities, opportunities and challenges of city living among other topics on this blog and I hope you join me for that trip.