Globally Rational

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This is the third article in my View From Above series. Click here to see the first two: the first one covers Kuwait, London, New York, and Boston; the second one covers Missouri and Indiana.

Off in the distance, I see the lights emanating from Pittsburgh. Compared with the rest of the areas along the route of my flight, which left from Kansas City, Pittsburgh’s vicinity seems to be much more than a simple set of suburbs. The image of the working-class Pennsylvanian (or Ohioan), which has been increasingly burned into my head as I follow the 2008 election, is completely justified by this sight. There are lights far outside of the actual city, suggesting that there is no dearth of small factory-centered areas here.

My previous image of Pennsylvania consisted of a largely semi-urban forested (produced by the state’s name, which translates to “Penn’s Forest”) with a highly-educated economic hub in Philadelphia and a highly-industrialized working-class environment in Pittsburgh. While this impression was only affirmed by my few trips across the Pennsylvania turnpike, it seems that a view from above dispels my theory.

I am currently flying over what seems like an urban area, but there is no heavily-concentrated set of downtown lights. My best guess is that this is another of the many industrial areas west of Philadelphia. It bears a striking resemblance to most of the suburbs near my home of St. Louis, but there is no city in the middle like what I’m used to seeing. This must be another area whose economy is supported by the working-class Americans who, as Hillary and Obama never forget to mention, form the backbone of this country.

The farther east I travel, the more brightness I see along the highways. The patches of black, which were the norm in Missouri, are nearly nonexistent now and there seems to be a gradient of the luminosity along the roads. I will never again picture Pennsylvania as “Penn’s Forest”… now, it is the link between the highly-developed East Coast and the mostly rural Midwest.

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This is the second post in my View From Above series. Click here to see the first, which covers Kuwait, London, New York, and Boston.

As I write this, I’m flying over central Indiana as part of my trip from Kansas City to Baltimore. Out of one corner of my window, I can see that we are about to fly over the very upscale and academic town of Bloomington. Out of the other corner, I can see the metropolis of Indianapolis, about 60 miles off to the north. Most of the land seems barren in the dark, but there is a trail of light going south along the highway that leads from Indianapolis to Bloomington. There are also a couple of other highways that carve a similar trail going south from Indiana’s capital, one that probably heads towards Evansville and another whose destination is likely Louisville.

As I approached Indianapolis from the east, I mostly just saw a sea of light in the distance. We were entering the twilight hours here in the Midwest, so I wasn’t actually sure if the source of the luminosity was a city or just the reflection from a huge patch of maize. I was more interested in crossing the Wabash and looking at my former hometown of Terre Haute, which was very recognizable thanks to its unique pattern of urbanization; there is a path of light leading from the main city to each set of outskirts in the South, East, and West, where a single major road seems to be the only hint of civilization.

Bloomington reminds me thoroughly of Columbia, Missouri, where I currently spend most of my time. The city is built around the Indiana University campus, which is full of classical architecture and a road system that, unlike any non-academic area, is simple because not every building needs to be beside a street. IU is obviously the type of school where most of the students spend a significant portion of their time on campus, unlike commuter universities like the local University of Missouri – St. Louis.

Between the small patches of light that I saw through Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, it is no surprise that most of the land was covered with farms. I noticed the most interesting part, however, after darkness struck: there are no lights in those areas. During my countless trips between Columbia and St. Louis, I have seen no lack of rural areas, but I never noticed (until now) that the lights in those areas are always off. Looking back, I can now remember a trip to an area about half an hour outside of Columbia where, after we turned off our headlights, the moonlight was the only way for us to see outside. The resources there are untapped; the land is empty. I’ll visit it again in 20 years to see how commercialized it will have undoubtedly become.

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A few days ago, I had the opportunity to fly over four major cities: Kuwait, London, Boston, and New York (in that order). Looking at them from the airplane window, I noticed that the layout of the different cities says a great deal about the many comparisons and contrasts that can be made:

-The outskirts of Kuwait City are, of course, mostly desert. Flying over the city, however, you can see the effects of the rapid development in the past decade. Nearly every building is new and all of the engineering is novel. The roads are wide and well-developed. There is a high level of development near the ocean and it slowly faded as I looked towards the desert. It is obvious that the development is quickly working its way west and north, as the plans for Madinat al-Hareer confirm. Kuwait is 300 years old, but it has recently become a cosmopolitan hotspot.

-London’s vicinity is astonishingly green. Everywhere I looked, there was a golf course or a park or a cricket ground or a rugby field or a strange patch of greenery whose purpose even Google Earth failed to identify. I assume that in London, these patches of greenery are no unusual sight… but to a person whose background is in Pakistan (where pointless greenery can never be maintained because of negligence) and the US (where pointless greenery can never be maintained because it is inefficient), it was refreshing. I was not surprised to find that London has one of the lowest population densities of all megapolises. I learned today that the reason for the greenery (and the fact that London, according to the last link, is still less sparsely populated than New York) is that the UK has a Green Belt policy. London has grown very fast in its more recent history, but the city planners have kept up to pace, unlike their counterparts in Boston. The houses are very well-organized and the roads are far more modern than I’d expect out of such an old city.

-Boston is the reason why my expectations were low for London. When I spent the summer of 2005 in Boston, my biggest complaint was that the city was still functioning around the urban planning (or lack thereof) that happened when the Puritans founded the city 400 years ago. The old roads had been paved (but not widened) and new, equally narrow roads had been added. Houses were spaced out well, but this drove up property values unnecessarily without allowing the sort of greenery that characterized London. From the plane, Boston looked like a town built in SimCity by somebody who isn’t particularly good at the game. The skyline is modern, but the rest of the city seems like it was just thrown together haphazardly when settlers built houses wherever they wanted. Soon, everything was a historical landmark and nothing could be destroyed (plus, it’s cheaper to improve things than to rebuild them).

-New York suprised me. JFK and LaGuardia International Airports, both of which I went to, are located on Long Island. I expected the area to be packed with apartment buildings with no room to walk. I assumed that the roads would be just like Boston’s, since New York is just as old and its growth as a city was much more rapid. What I found, however, was houses with front yards, a developed grid of roads, and lots of baseball fields. It turns out that New York City’s vicinity is even more sparsely populated than London’s. I guess the idea of sprawling streets and tall apartment buildings is overplayed by the media and reinforced whenever somebody visits downtown Manhattan. It’s hard to make any direct conclusions from this; it’s just a series of observations that I think are interesting. I will continue to write about various cities as I fly to different parts of the world in the future. If I haven’t flown in a while, I might even use Google Earth to cheat.

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