Engineer and the City A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969 (1969) / Chapter Skim
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METHODOLOGIES
METHODOLOGIES
Pages 31-62
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From page 31... ...
But here before the court was a man who had lain immobile for six months. So, the court found in his behalf, and granted him a judgment of a million dollars.
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From page 32... ...
One reason for this failure is that city planners have been more interested in upgrading the value of the city's real estate than in upgrading the lives of the human beings who inhabit the real estate. They have tried to create middle-class neighborhoods by driving lower-class Negro residents out of the neighborhoods being renewed, and bringing white middle-class residents in; 32
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From page 33... ...
However, we can still alter the site selection policies that crystallize public housing in our central cities. Other federal subsidies have helped the decline of the inner city, also.
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From page 34... ...
In this connection it "is interesting to note, from the recent NEWSWEEK special report on the white majority, entitled "Troubled America," that the priorities of the white middle-class people of this country are startlingly similar to those of the black people. They were more concerned about how their tax money was being spent than they were about the tax burden itself.
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From page 35... ...
What this instance said to me was that for the first time, people are beginning to recognize that there are other needs that poor people and black people and brown people have. What I saw there was the fact that an opportunity was being extended by that community for people to have an ownership stake in that which they had always lived-their community-but which they could never before call their own.
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From page 36... ...
As engineers, your commitment is needed to this process, and your involvement in it is crucial to its success. The purpose for the Urban Coalition, the purpose for many such organizations today, is to help this country make orderly, systematic change, to provide the people with an opportunity to feel that they are a part of the process.
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From page 37... ...
We are toying with the idea in the Urban Coalition to try to get cities to do several kinds of things. One is to take a comprehensive look at the city and try to deal with all the problems that they can identify as having contributed to the problem that exists there-that would be housing, jobs, education, economic development, crime and delinquency, the whole institution of justice, law enforcement-and see whether it is possible to deal with all of them on a comprehensive basis.
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From page 38... ...
The research now involves some 85 professional analysts-roughly 60 full-time equivalents. And we ourselves have been transformed from the New York office of a California corporation to a new entity: essentially a joint venture of the city government and Rand, a New York nonprofit corporation, governed by its own board of trustees.
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From page 39... ...
And above all, they had observed that consultants liked to address problems in their pure and uncontaminated form, thereby ensuring conclusions that no city government had the money, the managerial talent, or the political power to put into effect. And consultants of whatever variety, having delivered their conclusions, typically went away.
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From page 40... ...
Wherever possible we now attempt to have agency people themselves participate fully in the work-checking our assumptions, challenging our hypotheses, proposing alternative lines of inquiry, noting barriers to implementation. It has not always been possible to find city officials or staff members willing to involve themselves so deeply.
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From page 41... ...
It is a New York nonprofit corporation intended, in the language of its Certificate of Incorporation, 'To conduct programs of scientific research and study, and to provide reports and recommendations relevant to the operations, planning or administration of the City of New York." It is the first attempt by a major city government and a research institution to establish a center for the continuing application of science and of analytic techniques to problems of urban life and local government. The creation of the Institute seems to me one of the most hopeful and significant outcomes of our activities so far.
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From page 42... ...
ANSWER: My answer to the first question comes in several parts. I think it is hopeless to think that any of us can individually come to grips with each of the relevant analytic methods.
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From page 43... ...
opinions on that. As to the second question, it seems to me that the enterprise I have described is like NASA in one respect.
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From page 44... ...
Third, the level and rate variables making up that structure are identified and explicitly described in the equations of a computer simulation model. Fourth, the computer model is then used to simulate in the laboratory the dynamic behavior implicit in the identified structure.
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From page 45... ...
The level variables are changed only by the rates of flow. The rate variables depend only on the levels.
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From page 46... ...
In other words, an area with high upward economic mobility is more attractive than one offering no hope of advancement. The circle UHM relates the underemployed population to the available housing.
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From page 47... ...
On the other hand, the underemployed to job ratio was low, meaning that the population was below the job opportunities, jobs were readily available, economic opportunity was good, and upward economic mobility was high. During this early period of growth and high economic activity, the underemployed population was being effectively adjusted in relation to other activity by balancing good economic opportunity against a housing shortage.
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From page 48... ...
The result is a cascading of mutual interactions that raise the economic activity of the area, increase upward economic mobility for the underemployed population, and shift the population internally from the underemployed to the labor class. This is done without driving the existing low-income population out of the area.
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From page 49... ...
Here it is the increased tightness of housing that allows job opportunities to increase faster than population until a good economic balance is reached. I stress economic revival as the first stage of rebuilding a depressed area because it appears that an economic base must precede social and cultural development.
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From page 50... ...
The depressed mode is one characterized by the pressures that come from decaying buildings, low incomes, and social disorientation. But the revived mode also contains pressures.
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From page 51... ...
I can answer the substance of the question by saying that in this particular model we recognize that the surrounding world is always changing, but we are looking at how the city relates to the surrounding world. What are its characteristics relative to the surrounding world?
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From page 52... ...
Have you considered the simultaneous modeling of two or more cities where the excess housing is juggled back and forth between the cities to stabilize the overall dynamics? ANSWER: It has been discussed; it has not been done.
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From page 53... ...
Before these processes turn around, we must have widespread public understanding of the nature of complex social systems. One cannot push such ideas onto the public.
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From page 54... ...
We congratulated ourselves that we had an off-theshelf answer to our crises. We would simply dust off the town meeting idea and put it to work in the neighborhood centers, the private social and welfare groups, and the government agencies that sprang up to correct urban conditions.
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From page 55... ...
Minorities place such a high value on communications, in fact, that they now award top positions of leadership to those who are the most articulate. Black people, for instance, want to be heard.
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From page 56... ...
The same lack of organization exists on the side of the white majority, too, and black people are sometimes surprised to learn that there is no solid, well-disciplined white conspiracy operating against them. An example of this division in Minneapolis was the Ron Edwards case, an explosive issue for three months early last year.
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From page 57... ...
We've got to build our black people. We cannot build our black people, our revolutionary forces, through groups devoted to the status quo." Matt believes it is the black man's first duty to gain power-and the most effective route to power, he believes, is confrontation.
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From page 58... ...
The availability of this privately contributed money has made possible conventional financing of these same companies in an amount well over half a million dollars. The Coalition has also been instrumental in turning the attention of the Minneapolis United Fund toward the inner city and the needs of ghetto neighborhoods.
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From page 59... ...
The minorities are slowly learning the fact that the establishment, or whatever you want to call that white majority, doesn't exist. In Minneapolis, a number of people expressed some surprise that fourteen businessmen who created the original Urban Coalition had widely differing views on what should be done.
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From page 61... ...
Session III CASE HISTORIES Thomas C Kavanagh, Chairman
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