A Bit More Detail

I’ve a post up at Demography Matters taking a look at the latest developments on emigration from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, in the Caucasus.

Emigration is not diminishing with 23% of the population having emigrated, despite the difficulties faced by Georgians in travelling internationally and the relative insecurity of these migrants (the largest community is in an anti-Georgian Russia, while the largest Georgian immigrant community in the European Union is in Greece). Rather, emigration is a necessity.

Go, read.

Open File’s John Michael McGrath has highlighted an interesting fact about Toronto’s changing population.

While we’ve noted some of the trends in Toronto that were revealed in the 2011 census before, here’s one that seems to have slipped past people’s notice, mostly because it applies to something that doesn’t exist anymore. The area of the old City of Toronto, before 1997′s amalgamation, has finally seen its population increase above its previous high—in 1971.

Like many North American cities, the ’70s weren’t kind to the downtown core of what was then Metro Toronto. A combination of economic and demographic factors (jobs leaving for lower-tax suburbs; baby boomers starting new families in bigger suburban houses; shrinking family sizes) caused a large drop in the population of Old Toronto. From Canadian census numbers compiled by City of Toronto staff, this is what happened:

In the decade of 1971–1981, Old Toronto lost 16 per cent of its population—more than 100,000 people. It then recovered those numbers, only slowly, until the last five years of 2006-2011.

So what happened?

“We’ve comprehensively rebuilt the downtown core,” says Zack Taylor, doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto’s Cities Centre. “We’ve poured billions of dollars in private capital tinto reconstructing the older part of the city, to essentially have the population end up the same.”

In the core area of the old city, roughly from Bathurst to the Don Valley and from Rosedale south the the waterfront, numbers that Taylor collected from census data show what happened. Essentially, the number of dwelling units almost doubled while the population since 1981 has increased more slowly, leading to a substantial decline in average household size[.]

McGrath notes that much of the recent population growth was concentrated in districts on the Toronto waterfront, south of King Street, where the condo boom has been at its most uninhibited. Future population growth in downtown Toronto will require more sensitive development than the surfeit of empty buildable land on the waterfront allowed in previous years. Too, he also points out that growth in the urban core helps sustain the ongoing growth in disparities between the downtown and the suburbs, shades of the “Three Torontos” that people like Hulchanski have been talking about.

There are problems with Toronto having surpassed its 1971 high that are immediately felt by most residents. The city wasn’t built to handle the 1971 population with 2011′s car ownership, so congestion is one obvious result. David Hulchanski at the University of Toronto points out that as economic activity explodes in the city core, it pushes poverty out to the suburbs where services are more sparse, or absent.

It’s giving Toronto a feel less like many American cities, and closer to the London/Paris model says Taylor, where a wealthy core is surrounded by a ring of suburban poverty associated with immigrants and visible minorities.

But the numbers show Toronto avoided the arguably worse fate of a city like Detroit, where whites and wealth fled the city entirely, leaving urban blacks with an empty shell. “[Toronto's] is a problem that many American cities would love to have,” says Taylor.

I’ve a post up at Demography Matters taking note of a recent report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal reporting that sex selection of one kind or another seems to be operating among Indo-Canadians particularly. What could this mean? Go, read and discuss.

I’ve a post up at Demography Matters linking to some interesting posts, one on Brazilian migration to the United States, the other on the stable and relatively high sex ratio of Siberia, the last on the sex trade and migration in Spain. Go, read.

• 80 Beats notes that the failure of North Korea’s satellite launch has had huge negative consequences for that country: diplomatic, economic, and, of course, internal.
• Acts of Minor Treason’s Andrew Barton is thankful that, on the eve of the conservative Wildrose Party’s victory over the apparently not-conservative-enough Progressive Conservatives in Alberta, he doesn’t live in that province of Canada.
• Language Log has a guest post by one S. Robert Ramsey defending the esthetics of Korean script vis-a-vis Chinese as part of what seems to be a backhanded attack on Chinese script for its excessive (?) complexities.
• Marginal Revolution links to an interesting new report identifying urban growth in developing countries as the main driver of economic growth in the coming decades.
• Noel Maurer points out, in a defense of Rachel Maddow’s new book on American militarism against one criticism, that in the pre-Second World War era just as now the United States was constantly fighting little wars.
• At Savage Minds, Christopher Kelty is unimpressed by the Archaeological Institute of America’s opposition to open access for papers.
• Slap Upside the Head notes that anti-gay groups are upset with Canada’s BioWare game developer for including the potential for same-sex relationships in its online games–Star Wars is mentioned, but Mass Effect 3 also includes some.
• Towleroad takes apart the argument that the apparently orderly evacuation of the Titanic a century ago was achieved because of Christian values which have now vanished from our godless culture. Where to begin?
• Zero Geography reproduces a map of the top Twitter-using countries and finds that the United States and the United Kingdom rank alongside Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Malaysia. Twitter is global, it seems.

I’ve a post up at Demography Matters that lays out the possibility of a sudden political transition in China and wonders what impact it would have on demographic trends there.

Ideas, anyone?

NewAppsBlog’s John Protevi linked to a very worthwhile post by JoAnn Wypijewski at The Nation, “Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding”. This post establishes, in the United States at least, a connection between reproductive freedoms and civil rights, by establishing the intimate links between coerced reproduction and the denial of reproductive rights and the particular nature of American slavery.

Slave populations in the United States, most unlike slave populations elsewhere in the world, maintained themselves, in fact grew through natural increase. Why? Wypijewski points to the research of American legal scholar Pamela Bridgewater, who points out that only the sustained domination of the sexual and reproductive lives of African slaves by their white owners let this occur. This domination needs to be remembered.

Pamela Bridgewater’s argument, expressed over the past several years in articles and forums, and at the heart of a book in final revision called Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom, presents the most compelling conceptual and constitutional frame I know for considering women’s bodily integrity and defending it from the right.

In brief, her argument rolls out like this. The broad culture tells a standard story of the struggle for reproductive rights, beginning with the flapper, climaxing with the pill, Griswold v. Connecticut and an assumption of privacy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and concluding with Roe v. Wade. The same culture tells a traditional story of black emancipation, beginning with the Middle Passage, climaxing with Dred Scott, Harpers Ferry and Civil War and concluding with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Both stories have a postscript—a battle royal between liberation and reaction—but, as Bridgewater asserts, “Taken together, these stories have no comprehensive meaning. They tell no collective tale. They create no expectation of sexual freedom and no protection against, or remedy for, reproductive slavery. They exist in separate spheres; that is a mistake.” What unites them but what both leave out, except incidentally, is the experience of black women. Most significantly, they leave out “the lost chapter of slave breeding.”

I need to hit the pause button on the argument for a moment, because the considerable scholarship that revisionist historians have done for the past few decades has not filtered into mass consciousness. The mass-culture story of slavery is usually told in terms of economics, labor, color, men. Women outnumbered men in the enslaved population two to one by slavery’s end, but they enter the conventional story mainly under the rubric “family,” or in the cartoon triptych Mammy-Jezebel-Sapphire, or in the figure of Sally Hemmings. Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself. That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm X’s distinction between “the house Negro” and “the field Negro,” erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the “favorite” that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

We don’t commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their “stock,” their reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen.They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives’ practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion.Reproduction and its control became the planters’ prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a window—abortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.

This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Tom’s Cabin that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to arrange books on her new shelves: “’If we could get a breed of gals that didn’t care, now, for their young uns…would be ’bout the greatest mod’rn improvement I knows on,” says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice flows.

The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewater’s argument, which continues thus. “If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.”

[. . .]

Bridgewater argues that because slavery depended on the slaveholder’s right to control the bodies and reproductive capacities of enslaved women, coerced reproduction was as basic to the institution as forced labor. At the very least it qualifies among those badges and incidents, certainly as much as the inability to make contracts. Therefore, sexual and reproductive freedom is not simply a matter of privacy; it is fundamental to our and the law’s understanding of human autonomy and liberty. And so constraints on that freedom are not simply unconstitutional; they effectively reinstitute slavery.

The courts and Congress of the nineteenth century understood contracts, and even a little bit about labor. Women they understood wholly by their sex and wombs, and those they regarded as the property of husbands once owners exited the stage. It is not our fate to live with their failings. It is not our fate to live with the failure of later courts to apply the Thirteenth Amendment to claims for sexual and reproductive freedom or even to consider the historical context out of which the Fourteenth Amendment also emerged. It is not our fate, in other words, to confine ourselves to the pinched language of choice or even of privacy—or to the partial, white-centric history of women’s struggle for reproductive rights.

Geocurrents’ Martin Lewis has a post up that takes a look at population density in the San Francisco Bay Area and its intersections with mass transit. I thought it worthwhile to highlight it given the critical importance of population density in debates on transit in the Greater Toronto Area.

A sound urban system, environmentalists now argue, is characterized by mixed-use, dense, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods focused around transit stops. Unfortunately, many of the Bay Area’s more thickly inhabited suburbs are not situated near rail lines, increasing their dependence on automobiles. By the same token, neighborhoods around metro and commuter train stations are often marked by relatively low density. Although both market forces and environmental reason call for tightly packed housing in such areas, the anti-intensification, NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) movement has forestalled development of this kind.

To demonstrate what might seem to be counter-intuitive assertions, Stanford cartographer Jake Coolidge and I have been working on a visualization scheme to show the relationship between population density and public transportation in the Bay Area. Jake’s maps and graphs are now complete, and are posted here. They focus on the Yellow Line of BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), which runs from the San Francisco Airport through the city to the far eastern suburbs, and Caltrain, which goes from downtown San Francisco through “the Peninsula” and Silicon Valley to San Jose and beyond. For comparative purposes, paired maps show similar systems located elsewhere in the country, the Orange Line of the Washington D.C. Metro in the case of BART, and the SEPTA Main Line in metropolitan Philadelphia in the case of Caltrain. All four maps show population density in relation to the rail-lines and their stations. Paired graphs indicate the number of persons living within half a mile radius—a reasonable walking distance—of each station on all four lines. (For a complementary analysis of demographic patterns, see the Caltrain HSR Compatibility Blog).

Some interesting patterns are revealed by these maps and graphs. As the first set shows, downtown San Francisco stands out for its density. This pattern, of course, was established well before the construction of the BART line, which dates only to the 1960s. Outside of this restricted area, density in the Bay Area drops off sharply. Even Oakland, supposedly a highly urban area, is not particularly crowded. To the east of Oakland, BART runs through a highly elite, quasi-rural area around Orinda and Lafayette before it enters classical suburbia in Walnut Creek and Concord. Although a few moderately dense developments have sprouted around BART stations in this area, settlement remains relatively thin. Few people walk or even bike to these BART stations, as most are compelled to drive by the distances involved.

The Washington Metro presents some instructive contrasts. Note that much of downtown Washington has relatively few residents; although many people work in the Federal Triangle neighborhood, few live there. The highest density along the Metro’s Orange Line is found not in the District, but rather in “suburban” Arlington, Virginia, especially around the Courthouse station. The strip of land between Rosslyn and Balston presents a nice example of successful urban intensification. When the Metro line was originally opened, Arlington was sleepy, low-rise ‘burb. I lived in the Courthouse area in the late 1980s, and witnessed its rapid transformation into a vibrant urban pocket. A short stroll from the metro-line, Arlington remains as suburban as it ever was, but around each station a walkable urban neighborhood has emerged. The result is a kind of a “bead-city” stretching along the rail-line. Is it odd, I must ask, that northern Virginia has allowed such eco-friendly urban intensification, whereas the supposedly more environmentally aware Bay Area prevents it?

[. . .]

The Philadelphia pattern is quite different. Philadelphia’s high density areas are much more extensive than those of San Francisco, as can be seen on the maps. Density along the BART line in northern San Francisco, however, exceeds that of the inner stretch of the Main Line, as can be seen by comparing the two graphs. The suburban reaches of the Main Line also contrast sharply with the Caltrain Line. Whereas the density trend along the Caltrain corridor is virtually flat, that of the Main Line is steep. Over most of its extent, the Main Line passes through low-density communities characterized by “old wealth” estates. Similar neighborhoods are plentiful to the south of San Francisco, but they tend to be located away from the train tracks, towards the mountains. The one major exception is well-heeled Atherton, situated between Menlo Park and Redwood City. As Atherton’s Caltrain station operates only on weekends, it is not mapped here.

If the environmentalists’ call for a transition to a lower-carbon future is to be realized, population growth should be encouraged around transit stations. In actuality, it has been heavily discouraged in northern California. As this cartographic exercise shows, neighborhoods near the main rail lines of the San Francisco Bay Area have tremendous potential for intensification. Urbanization, in turn, would allow ailing lines, like Caltrain, to return to health.

Amy O’Leary’s New York Times article “Everybody Inhale: How Many People Can Manhattan Hold?” isn’t just of interest to New Yorkers. Manhattan is arguably the paradigmatic metropolis of the modern world; the question of how many Manhattanites can live, sustainably and in a reasonable degree of comfort, in that territory is universally relevant.

As crowded as the city feels at times, the present-day Manhattan population, 1.6 million, is nowhere near what it once was. In 1910, a staggering 2.3 million people crowded the borough, mostly in tenement buildings. It was a time before zoning, when roughly 90,000 windowless rooms were available for rent, and a recent immigrant might share a few hundred square feet with as many as 10 people. At that time, the Lower East Side was one of the most crowded places on the planet, according to demographers. Even as recently as 1950, the Manhattan of “West Side Story” was denser than today, with a population of two million.

By 1980, with the subsequent flight to suburbia, the population fell to 1.4 million. Then crime dropped, the city strengthened economically, and real estate prices started a steady climb, defying broader downturns in the economy as any dip in the market came to be viewed as a buying opportunity.

But those numbers measure Manhattan at its sleepiest, literally. Census figures count only residents, neglecting, as E. B. White famously wrote, “the New York of the commuter, the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night.”

If a whole city can be created and destroyed in a day, Manhattan comes close. During the workday, the population effectively doubles, to 3.9 million, as shown in a new report by the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management of New York University. Day-trippers, hospital patients, tourists, students and, most of all, commuters, drain the suburbs and outer boroughs, filling streets and office space with life. Wednesday, it turns out, is the most populous day of the week, and special events, like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, push the total past five million, offering a glimpse of what an even more crowded Manhattan might feel like.

So if Manhattan’s slow but steady growth continues — and there’s no sign it won’t — how many people can it handle? Answers to this seemingly simple question could fill enough pages to pack a spacious studio apartment, but a quick helicopter tour of future scenarios for Manhattan’s growth shows a tangle of towers and trade-offs.

O’Brien notes that Manhattan’s fabric will certainly change radically even with the predicted growth of a quarter-million people by 2030. Low-density areas will be filled, and the skyline is going to rise substantially.

These days, Ed Glaeser, a Harvard economist, inevitably comes up in conversations about how cities should grow. In his recent book, “Triumph of the City,” he makes an argument — which many consider persuasive — that dense places are uniformly better and more interesting than emptier ones, and that they should be allowed to develop unfettered, even if it means building towers where brownstones once stood.

Affordability is the first reason. If you build up, he says, housing prices will fall and more people will be able to live in their own sliver of Manhattan sky. And that’s a good thing, Mr. Glaeser adds, since the energy of all those newcomers will fuel innovation and entrepreneurship, attracting talent and growth to create a virtuous circle. From energy-efficiency to life expectancy to finding a date or something to do on a Saturday night, Mr. Glaeser argues that denser places have the edge.

He’s all for sacrificing charming stretches of the city for more residential space. He favors preserving noteworthy architecture, but suggests a cap on the number of protected buildings at any one time. If you want to protect a new building, he says, another should come off the list.

“There are certainly individual buildings that I feel sentimental about,” Mr. Glaeser said, recalling the memory of watching snow fall on the brownstones and the old Magyar church across the street from his childhood apartment on 69th Street between First and Second Avenues. “Sure, I would feel a little bit sad if that was torn down, but the upside of having thousands more people getting to enjoy New York would outweigh my personal feelings.”

Mr. Glaeser thinks restricting building height is fundamentally unfair. He has proposed scrapping the city’s permitting process in favor of “impact fees” that developers would pay to cover the infrastructure costs associated with their buildings. So if somebody wanted to build a 50-story building, he or she would simply put up the money required to support its water, sewer, power and so forth.

O’Brien concludes that the ultimate upper limits to population in Manhattan may be very high, so long as the city is willing to support investment in innovative solutions to infrastructure. She invokes the memory of the Kowloon Walled City of Hong Kong, a very high-density enclave in that high-density city that was demolished in the 1990s. If Manhattan had the Walled City’s population density, it would support 65 million people.

(Crossposted at Demography Matters for obvious reasons.)

I’ve a brief post at Demography Matters collecting some interesting population-related links, everything from changing Russian demographics to somewhat improved sex ratios at birth in India to South African migration to Georgia.