The tots sang ``Ring-a-Rosie'', ``London Bridge is Falling Down''

[austin_dern]

I mentioned my regrets that my father wasn't able to go to bunny_hugger's with me and my mother. There's obvious reasons for this, not least that everybody involved is certain that he'll get along fantastically well with her father; they've got uncannily similar personality profiles, particularly in the desire to make small talk with everything up to and including certain kinds of statuary. But I also think he'd do some good in moderating or deflecting conversations that threaten to get on sore spots. My mother and I can be tone-deaf.

A case in point: my mother got to talking with bunny_hugger about the size of the city of Lansing, and said that it felt to her much like the suburbs which make up so much of New Jersey. This irritated bunny_hugger and my mother was surprisingly oblivious to that. It is arrogant of east-coasters to regard midwestern cities as these amusing efforts at urbanization, as though every place needed to be midtown Manhattan to be a city.

I think that I understand what my mother was getting at, though: much of the Lansing area has roughly the population density, the packing of buildings and streets and people, comparable to the vast urban swath of New Jersey, which we think of as suburbs because the population of New Jersey is in either the suburbs of New York City or the suburbs of Philadelphia. New Jersey has several cities which are cities in their own right, but they are also clearly subordinate communities to the big cities.

And if all you get a sense of is how crowded a place is, it's easy to say that the feel of Lansing's Ingham County may not be different from (say) Ocean County. But a city isn't population density. It's this interface between residences and commercial spaces and industry and cultural items and recreation activities and governments and transportation and many more things. I wonder if we'd have had the weather to justify walking around everywhere all weekend whether my mother would have the same reaction.

[ Oh, I just bothered to look it up. If Wikipedia's to be trusted, Ocean County has nearly twice the population density of Ingham County, 900 people per square mile compared to 500 per square mile. Jackson, New Jersey, comes in at about 550 people per square mile, although Lansing comes in at 3200 people per square mile. But, again, population density is not the same as being a city. ]

Anyway, I suppose my whole point to this is, my mother got a little East Coast snobbish about how urbanized Michigan is, and I didn't do enough to deflect it to less agonizing territory.

Trivia: On his first balloon ascent, over Paris, the aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont had a lunch of roast beef, chicken, ice cream and cake, champagne, and hot coffee. Source: First Flight: The Wright Brothers And The Invention of The Airplane, T A Heppenheimer.

Currently Reading: Angel Station, Walter Jon William.

PS: Early April's Math Comics ... a roundup from a surprisingly busy week of mathematics name-dropping.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree with your mother on this. There's always been this touchiness in the midwest about the idea that our cities aren't "major cities" in the sense that New York and its surroundings are, but they plainly aren't. Even downtown Los Angeles isn't really comparable to New York City - lakefront Chicago inside the Loop comes sort of close. It's worth remembering that the reason the Chicago Cubs are cursed to never again win the World Series is that Philip Wrigley feared that press attention paid to the goat would damn Chicago as "midwestern", hence quaint, in the eyes of New Yorkers. Whether or not that's the true explanation, it's the sort of motive that most midwesterners accept without question. It rings true.

The tots sang ``Ring-a-Rosie'', ``London Bridge is Falling Down''

I love that song.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I'm not claiming Lansing is a "major" city. I am claiming that my neighborhood is not "suburban," which has less to do with whether the buildings are tall and more to do with the kind of neighborhood it is and the fact that it's not a suburb of anything.

I really, really hate when East coasters come out here and start patronizing me about where I live. Austin knows I hate this, it's been a subject of conversation before, and it bothered me that Austin-Mom would not stop insisting I lived in a suburb when I repeatedly and with increasing irritation said that I do not.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

And my point would be that Lansing is --- certainly in her area --- a city. It's got place. It's got scales in which it's sensible to walk, to bike, to take the bus, or take a car. It's got locally-generated and imported events. It's got business on scales from local to continental at least. I'm not sure what else a city needs to have, but it's a different feel from what a suburb has.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, no major cities are similar; an important city is tied to its geography and its history in ways that make it distinct. But cities have got some properties in common; I'm not sure that I can pin down exactly what they are, although I gave it a try below. Lansing isn't a Great City, but it is unmistakably a city.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

With regard to population densities: city to city is a more fair comparison than county to county. There are certainly large parts of Ingham County that are rural, though we didn't really see any during her visit. (We did see a rural part of Eaton county briefly.) There are also suburbs of Lansing that are distinctively suburban, such as Okemos, and we did spend a little time in them. I'm just saying that Lansing is not a suburb and my neighborhood in particular is an urban and not a suburban neighborhood. The point at which she tried to say that my neighborhood (a trying-hard but moderately rough neighborhood a mile and a half from the city center) and her neighborhood (a gated golf course development) are roughly the same kind of neighborhood was the point at which my head almost exploded, showering the rest of the eatery with the pieces of my mind I felt like giving.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

City-to-city is much more fair. But there is a problem in that New Jersey municipalities tend to be pretty small things, and it's quite easy to get an impressive-sounding population-per-square-mile number if your municipality is a tiny wedge in the center of a big municipal district (eg, Perth Amboy, 8500 people per square mile, which is over half Singapore's density, but it's five square miles). I've actually started digging out statistics on places I've lived and I'm trying to find ones with areas at least comparable to Lansing or the Lansing municipal area.

I can kind of see a level where your neighborhood and my mother's are similar, in that they are single-family homes on lots not much wider than the houses, but at that level of abstraction nearly every neighborhood that isn't the Australian Nularbor or a New York tenement apartment is similar.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

She seemed shocked and amazed that most of the houses here are rental properties -- I'm not even entirely sure she believed me -- and I couldn't work out why that was so surprising to her. It suggests something about different expectations, but I'm not sure what.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It does. I suspect that she's been trained to think of rental properties as being ones around tourist sites, like the Shore or the Outer Banks, and that's certainly not applicable here.

I'm not sure she's thought about houses being for rent by a campus.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

They're not mostly rented by students, in this neighborhood. They're rented by ordinary families of modest means.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's a relative novelty, at least in this neighborhood. My parents may have lived and worked too long in communities that don't have more modest means.