Albert S. Fu

March 21, 2014August 6, 2014

Globalization, Logistics and the Treadmill of Production in Metropolitan Waste Management

This paper examines the growth of Logistics Service Providers (LSP) managing metropolitan solid waste (MSW), as well as, neoliberalism’s effect on the processes that allow for urban growth. The combination of global urban growth, the expansion of monopoly capitalism and domination of neoliberal policies throughout the world has resulted in MSW management to be increasingly outsourced to third party providers. However, these providers do not merely handle MSW. Rather, these private firms treat MSW as part of an integrated supply chain in which “waste” is a commodity handled by one of its many sectorial divisions. As such, MSW is not just a component of urban growth machines, but is part of an ever accelerating treadmill of production (Schnaiberg, 1980). The concept of the ‘treadmill of production,’ is a valuable tool for understanding the growing importance of logistics in this political and economic context. While, this paper will look at this process globally, I will pay special attention to the growth of LSPs in Turkey and their expansion into Pakistan. First, I will discuss the development of MSW in Turkey since the 1990s and its relationship to LSPs, and then I will discuss the role of Turkish firms in Pakistan.

Presented on March 21, 2014 at the Urban Affairs Association Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX

March 1, 2014December 14, 2014

Adding Visualization to Your Course

Visualization, or more specifically data visualization, is currently a major trend in communicating information in business, news media, and increasingly academic research and teaching. A 2013 white paper produced by the Intel IT Center, notes how visualization-based data discovery tools can aid businesses analyze, interpret and present data. In 2014, Wired Magazine noted the relationship between data and visualization for a variety of different purposes from policy research to augmenting news articles on NASA programs and projects. An article in the journal Visual Studies (associated with the International Visual Sociology Association) discusses the different applications of data/information visualization for humanities and social science research.

While data has always been visual, perhaps the most significant software package that made visualization “easy” at work and in school is the release of Microsoft Office in 1990. For almost a quarter century, PowerPoint has dominated how we think about visually presenting information. A fantastic thing that PowerPoint does, which too few people make use of, is importing or create from scratch charts and tables from Excel. This allows for a more visually appealing (and more legitimate) presentation, than if you were to download an image from online, or use a scanned image from your textbook.

However, PowerPoint is not without challenges. While PowerPoint and its integration with Word and Excel makes for excellent in-class presentations of visual information, it is not particularly good online without the help of Adobe Presenter or Camtasia to turn the PowerPoint into a “screencast.” There are cloud based solutions such Google Docs, Office 365 and Prezi that can make presentations animated and clickable in an online environment.

In the world of the Internet, concise and visually appealing graphics are king. This is why infographics are very popular online. As the name suggests, they graphically represent information, data or knowledge quickly and clearly. There is no single type of infographic. It could be a chart, map or timeline. It could be a word cloud. Sometimes a well-designed infographic is better than a PowerPoint. There are a number of online tools that can help you create an infographic.

Infographic Tools

The above links allow to create either static images or embeddable infographics that summarizes a lot of information. It can contain a combination of text, charts, maps, and other images that communicate a point or idea with (hopefully) hard data.

It is important to recognize that web-based infographic need not be the only way in which you visualize information. There are a number of useful tools, applications, and scripts that can make the way in which you present information online aesthetically appealing, dynamic, and interactive. Moreover, this can be just as useful in person or online. It can also be an additional resource that is posted on D2L.

Timelines

Timelines can help you organize information chronologically. Dipity is an easy tool for creating a timeline. If you are building a webpage or site outside of Desire2Learn, I personally like TimelineJS. Specifically, I like it because of how it uses Google Docs. Because it uses JavaScript, it will not work on D2L. However, if you are using WordPress on your own site, there are TimelineJS plugins that allow you to easily embed it into pages and posts.

Maps

In addition to organizing information temporally, there’s also the spatial aspect of information. I’m a big fan of Google Fusion Tables. It allows you to upload an Excel file with addresses or other geographic information to create different maps. If you don’t have a Google Docs account or want to simplify the process, then I recommend BatchGeo.

Words

For those of you interested in content analysis, you can create a word cloud to visualize word frequency in a website or document, or chart the historical usage of a phrase through history. These word clouds can be dynamic and visually interesting. For instance Tagxedoand Wordle can highlight popular or commonly used words in a website or document. Google has their Ngrams viewer for Google Books. This allows you to see how often various words or phrases appear in books throughout time. In addition to content analysis, there are a number of tools that allow you to see what is “trending” right on the Internet or how various idea are interconnected. Google Trends lets you see what is being searched. While,TwitterSpectrum allows you to look at relationships between trending tweets. Finally, Wiki Mind Map lets you look at how various terms, ideas, or concepts are connected on Wikipedia.

Advanced Charts

For those of you who are more ambitious, you may want to create your own dynamic webpage or content file from scratch. Probably, the easiest way to include interactive charts and data tools for is Google Docs and the many products from Google Labs/Developers.

However, if you have space and time, there are some really neat things that you can do. For instance, you can upload an Excel spreadsheet to Google Docs and use Google Charts to create an aesthetically appealing and interactive chart for your website. For pre-existing charts, you can browse Google’s Public Data Explorer.

If you do not want to use Google Docs, IBM’s Many Eyes does essentially the same thing without requiring an account. In addition to the material on Many Eyes, Better World Fluxhas beautiful and socially relevant data for social scientists.

For those of you with a bit more web development experience, here are two jQuery Chart Libraries to make an interactive chart for your website.

Conclusion

This is by no means an exhaustive description or listing of resources for visualizing information. However, I do believe the existence of different types of infographics and visualizations reveal the ever changing relationship between visual culture and knowledge. This is a change that I believe educators need to be sensitive of as we engage 21st century learners.

Originally published on KU Converge: A Journal of Faculty Collaboration for Distance Education

February 22, 2014August 6, 2014

Theorizing Natural Disaster, Capitalism and the Built Environment

This paper offers a theoretical approach to the relationship between of natural disaster and cities for a future project. As I have argued in past work, the local political-ecology of wildfire shapes the commodification process of land. Or more specifically, wildfire in the urban periphery or wildland-urban interface has a profound impact on the rent seeking behavior by local developers (Balaban & Fu 2014). Wildfire and other natural disasters, in other words play both a spatial and metabolic role in the commodification of space. In this presentation, I want to go further and argue that natural disaster functions as an urban “crisis” that allows for new forms of commodification within cities in the absence of a broader systemic crisis. As such, I look at a trialectical approach to natural disaster, capitalism and the built environment.

Presented on February 22 at the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD

June 15, 2013August 6, 2014

Politics of Urban Development & Wildfires in California & Turkey

While Turkey and California suffer from similar wildfire risk, they have developed diametrically opposed fire suppression strategies: the former adopted an increasingly centralized strategy, while the latter dwells upon a highly decentralized system. This paper is a comparative analysis that relates the politics of land use in wild-urban interfaces (WUIs) to this divergence in firefighting strategies. Our argument is that evolution of the divergent fire suppression strategies in California and Turkey are linked to two different types of rent-seeking behavior. Developers and landed interest seek for absolute rent in Turkey and differential rent in California.

The decentralized strategy in California allows for distinguishing the property prices between areas of low and high protection and commodifies safety as a form of investment regulating the market prices of land. In Turkey, the tendency toward centralization of firefighting is a part of the composite political strategy to open new land for development by completing the hitherto unfinished cadastral records of the WUIs. Thus, the centralized firefighting strategy indirectly leads to extensive commodification of the WUIs in Turkey and expands the national land market.

(2014) w/ Utku Balaban. “Politics of Urban Development and Wildfires in California and Turkey.” Environment & Planning A. Vol. 46. No 4. pp. 820-836 DOI: 10.1068/a46163

April 6, 2013August 6, 2014

A Long-Historical Approach to Deindustrialization in Reading Pennsylvania: First-mover cities, environment, and Urban Restructuring

In September of 2011, The New York Times reported that Reading, Pennsylvania had edged out Flint, Michigan as having the largest poverty rate amongst cities with over 65,000 residents. The article presents a fairly straightforward picture of a city that had fallen upon hard times, as job loss and lack of education allowed it to slip from the 32nd poorest city in 2000 to the poorest city in 2010 according to the U.S. Census (Tavernise 2011). This article is not surprising. In fact, stories depicting the struggles of America’s Rust Belt have been common since the 1980s. Downsizing, outsourcing and factory closures were (and still are) concepts that have framed popular political and economic discourse, as well as research on deindustrialization (Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Negrey and Zickel 1994). The article, however, like much of the literature on Rust Belt cities neglect a more long-term environmental component of urban decline. By environment, I am referring the built/physical aspect, as well as the natural/ecological dimension. Specifically, explanations for deindustrialization that emphasize aggressive corporate policies to maximize profit, or the outcome of globalization are missing 1) the role of natural resources and 2) the role of infrastructure in the built environment. This environmental dimension not only explains the shape of local decline, but helps us to understand the obstacles that affect renewal.

A version was presented at the Urban Affairs Association on Apr 6, 2013 in San Francisco, CA and the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting on August 13,2013 in New York, NY.

March 23, 2013August 6, 2014

Glorified Fantasies and Masterpieces of Deception: Importing Las Vegas into the New South Africa

With the end of apartheid, Johannesburg and other South African cities are now part of a new global race to ascend and to become ‘world-class’ tourist and business centers. At the center of this development is the importation of Vegas-style spectacle by local entrepreneurs, firms, and other city boosters who create fantasyscapes such as the Emperor’s Palace and GrandWest. Financed and run by South African impresarios – whose luxurious empires transcend the continent – these resorts represent not only the globalization of gaming but the way in which South African cities see themselves within the world-wide urban hierarchy. As such, this paper seeks to untangle the global and local aspects of importing fantasy into the ‘New South Africa’.

(2014) w/ Martin J. Murray. “Glorified Fantasies and Masterpieces of Deception: Importing Las Vegas into the New South Africa.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Vol. 38. No 3. pp. 843-863 DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12006

December 7, 2012August 6, 2014

The Façade of Safety in California’s Shelter-In-Place Homes: History, Wildfire and Social Consequence

This article examines the seemingly incongruous ways in which Shelter-in-Place (SIP) practices have been sold, deployed and discussed in Southern California to battle wildfire. In particular, this will be a critique of the technical literature and application of fire safety in housing, as well as the anthropocentric hubris that humans can outsmart wildfire. Rather than focus on the success or failure of SIP, I am situating the SIP within the context of architecture, the history of fire safety, and the push of neoliberalism. The purpose of this approach is to make SIP and fire safe home design less about technology and know-how, and more about broader social issues such as privatization and social inequality.

(2013) “The Façade of Safety in California’s Shelter-In-Place Homes: History, Wildfire and Social Consequence.” Critical Sociology. Vol. 39. No 6. pp. 833-849. DOI: 10.1177/0896920512455936

July 26, 2012August 6, 2014

Materializing Spanish-Colonial Revival Architecture: History and Cultural Production in Southern California

In the early twentieth century, Spanish-Colonial Revival became embedded in the local culture of Southern California. However, this architectural style did not simply appear, rather it was materialized by architects, builders, realtors, and manufacturers of construction materials who built for and sold to homeowners. This process was not simply about using “history“ and “heritage.“ Rather, these social actors had to legitimize the ubiquitous use of red-tile roofing and cement stucco to establish new aesthetic norms and conventions for the vernacular landscape. As such, this article will look at the relationship between the political economy of building and aesthetics in the shaping of the vernacular landscape.

(2012) “Materializing Spanish-Colonial Revival: The Historical Landscape and Cultural Production in Southern California.” Home Cultures. Vol. 9. No. 2. pp. 149-172. DOI: 10.2752/175174212X13325123562223

August 1, 2011August 6, 2014

Contradictions in California’s Orientalist Landscape: Architecture, History and Spanish-Colonial Revival

Although Spanish-Colonial Revival architecture and place-names dominates Southern California’s landscape, one also finds simulated Middle Eastern bazaars, references to Ancient Egypt, and the frequent use of iconography from the non-European Old World. While the region’s landscape is a product of bricolage and postmodern sensibilities, this article looks at the history of ‘Orientalism’ in Southern California’s built environment. In particular, I am looking at the precedents for this seemingly contradictory use of the ‘Oriental’ in the region. The ‘Oriental’ as a sinfully seductive means of creating spectacle in the built environment, is both glorified and demonized at the same time in popular discourse. For example, the ‘Oriental’ is celebrated in shopping malls, but demonized culturally and politically. However, it is in this contradiction, we can see how history and ideology has shaped the vernacular landscape. As such, this article will look at early twentieth century examples of the ‘Oriental’ in Spanish-Colonial Revival as a foundation to understand contradictions in the built environment, culture, and racial hierarchies.

(2011) “Contradictions in California’s Orientalist Landscape: Architecture, History & Spanish-Colonial Revival.” Cities. Vol. 28. No. 4. pp. 240-346. DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2010.09.003

July 8, 2010August 6, 2014

Legitimizing Shelter-In-Place in Southern California: History, Landscape, and the Fear of Fire

This article looks at the way in which nature and wildfires have been used to legitimize not only urban development, but the way in which homes are bought and sold in Southern California. In particular, it looks at the seemingly incongruous ways in which Shelter-in-Place (SIP) practices have been sold, deployed and discussed in both the past and present. Thus, rather than focus on the success or failure of SIP, I look at the intersection of nature and ‘safety’ in urbanism to better understand how fear of natural disasters can be tied to the vernacular landscape