Warsaw

I visited Warsaw for one week in mid-March. My first day there was wintry. On my last day it felt like spring, encouraging people to shed their heavy coats. Easy to see this experience as a metaphor for Poland’s recent history: the nation emerged from almost fifty years of Communist rule in 1989 as one of the first Eastern bloc countries to escape from the Russian grip. Poland embraced market reforms and joined the EU in 2004.

Warsaw’s Communist legacy is still evident. The Palace of Culture and Science (formerly Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science) was the tallest building in Europe until 1957 and still dominates the skyline in the city center. An exuberant example of Soviet Realism, it was completed in 1955. There are also the blocks of former public housing, modernist monoliths scattered throughout Warsaw.



Polish Communism always had to deal with Polish nationalism. The old city reflects the commitment to rebuilding the city after the Nazis nearly annihilated it. Between the end of the Second World War and 1962, old town was carefully recreated from its ruins in an act of architectural memorialization that embodied Polish resilience and Polish identity. The many marvelous examples of Baroque and Neoclassical architecture remind us of Warsaw’s long connection with Europe.



The command economy still lives on in an unclear and uncertain land market. Large blocks of land lie undeveloped and undercapitalized, as investors are unsure of the property rights and legal claims. But there is also tremendous growth, especially at the edges of the city as the interstices between the modernist blocks are filled in with new housing and commerce and retail. One distinct feature is the number of gated communities. Guards and gates mark off many developments in both the central city and in the suburbs.

Like many post-Socialist cities, Warsaw has an infrastructure deficit, a huge housing shortage creating an overpriced housing market, a degraded urban environment in some places with feverish new investments in others. The city is still very Polish, one of the few examples of a European city that over the twentieth century saw it becoming more homogenous. Almost a half million Jews lived in this city prior to 1939. Now there is little more than 15,000. And yet to walk along Nowy Swiat is to see Starbucks and Subway, Colombian coffee houses and Indian restaurants. As I made my way up to the old town, I could see the local fashionistas sporting the ‘new black’ of purple scarves and coats. Cellphone usage is endemic and universal. Poland has such a poor landline network that consumers jumped more quickly to cellphone usage than in the USA. EU funding projects are ubiquitous throughout the city— refurbishing seventeenth-century palaces to providing school playgrounds.



In the city and the country as a whole there is realization that a post-Socialist city does not necessarily mean a neo-liberal city. Warsaw is in Mitteleuropa—situated between East and West Europe. It also occupies the difficult space between command and market economies, socialist and capitalist ideologies, authoritarian and democratic systems of government, of becoming as well as being.

(All Photos:© John Rennie Short)

The Barack Administration One Year On

It is over a year since I witnessed and celebrated the inauguration of President Barack Obama. I was just one of millions who lined the Mall in the bright sunlight on a bitterly cold day. We were thankful that the US had elected a thoughtful and intelligent candidate, and we looked forward to a change after the debacle of the Bush presidency.

Alas, one year on and the greatest accomplishment of his administration is that he has returned major banks and giant financial institutions to profitability. Compared to the bright skies and high hopes of last January, this January is dark and gloomy. Health care reform is tantalizingly close but still unrealized and increasingly precarious. The war in Afghanistan escalates, Guantanamo Bay prison is still open and the Republicans have just won a stunning victory in Massachusetts.


Inauguration Day 2009
(Photo: John Rennie Short)

The financial intuitions were bailed out while much needed regulatory reform was slow to gain traction within the Administration. A number of poor choices were made. Geithner was a flawed candidate for Treasury Secretary from the very start. Apart from the issue of his failure to pay taxes—the result of either incompetence or sleaziness, neither of which is a desirable attribute of a cabinet officer—he was always too closely aligned with Wall Street. The New York Fed does not so much regulate Wall Street but shills for it. Geithner was head of the New York Fed before his appointment to Treasury. With a tin ear for popular sentiment, Obama also backed Bernanke for a second term as head of the Fed. The architects of the bailout, which most American saw as flawed and unfair, were rewarded. While stabilization was needed, it should have been paralleled with tough regulatory reform. Yet this reform was never vigorously promoted when it was most obviously needed—last March. Only in the last few days has Obama taken on the banks, belatedly shifting his reliance on advice from Geithner to Volcker. But in the wake of the obscene end-of-the-year bonuses on Wall Street and the dramatic Democratic defeat in the Massachusetts, Obama’s move looks craven and desperate. He should have done this more vigorously much earlier when he could have ridden and guided popular sentiment.

Health care reform has been botched totally. The legislation was never explained to the US public, allowing political enemies easy targets and lots of room for attack. Having to deny “death panels” is not the best way to sell health care reform. The sprawling legislation was never explained nor fully justified by Obama, who allowed the process to meander untended through the swamp that is the US Congress. The Democrats in the Senate took too long, wasted too much time waiting for the support of Senators Snowe and Collins that never materialized and was never going to materialize after the summer assault on the bill by the Republican base. The grubby backroom dealings as Democratic Senators sought to get free rides for their constituents, were shabby and odious and generated even more popular resentment. And while all this was happening, the White House stayed strangely silent.

Barack Obama is a thoughtful person and gifted orator, but on the basis of his first year I am sorry to conclude that he is an incompetent President. In only a year on from a historic victory, he has managed to revitalize and energize an embattled and dispirited Republican Party, alienate independents and deeply disappoint the Democratic base. When you are elected on a popular mandate to change things, and your greatest accomplishment after one year in office is allowing financial institutions to pay out huge bonuses, then the depth of your failure is profound.

Barcelona

I love Barcelona. My love affair now stretches back over thirty-five years. I first went to the city in the 1970s. After a long train journey from London, traveling through the night across France, changing trains at the border between Spain and France, I arrived at the Barcelona Station. At the foot of the Ramblas, this station was the gateway to a vibrant metropolis, so charged with energy and difference it was scary and exciting, overwhelming and stimulating. Compared to the sedate British towns of my youth, it was wondrously excessive. Neither Spanish—too much Catalan for that—nor Southern European—there was too much of a hard commercial sense for that—the city was unique, old and modern combined in a complex urban fabric. The old Gothic Quarter, the softened-edge grid of the nineteenth-century extension and the legacy of Gaudi and Catalan modernism all combined to give Barcelona an architectural dazzle. I stayed in a cheap hotel in the old quarter where if you came back after 10 pm you clapped your hands in the street, and someone threw down a key. That Barcelona was hot and humid and pungent. And I loved it.



(Photos: John Rennie Short)

I have visited Barcelona regularly but infrequently since then, and between those intervals, both the city and I have changed. I became more traveled, more used to big, strange cities. And Barcelona changed in turn: it became the capital of a more autonomous Catalan in a more democratic Spain. It hosted the Olympics; it became ‘cool’, a fashionable destination for tourists from across Europe and around the world, now a pilgrimage destination for Japanese lovers of Gaudi. And in this process, the locals again rediscovered the wonders of their city, which is a welcome yet unexpected artifact of Barcelona’s globalization.

The city is now more cosmopolitan, more used to the foreign other and the international tourist. While the tourist crowds overwhelm parts of the city, the city is still too big, too complex, too much still in the process of becoming, and the vibrant street life and commercial vitality too exuberant for it to become a place at rest, the mere end point of tourist pilgrimages. Including my own.

Return to South Korea

I have returned from a quick visit to South Korea, my second trip to the country. The first time was in 1993. I noticed a number of changes. Some obvious. The banks of the Han River are much greener, more landscaped and more accessible. The city as a whole looks much greener than the uniformly grey of the concrete city I remember. Air quality, despite the huge increase in traffic, is noticeably better although still not great. The sheer weight of traffic as well as the airborne pollution from China creates a pall of smog across the city. Seoul is more globalized: there are Starbucks and more signs in English. South Koreans are connected to the rest of the world through economic linkages as well as diasporic connections and Internet traffic.

Of course there are the things about any foreign country that stand out. The ethnic homogeneity continues to be very obvious compared to other powerful economies. South Korea is more economically than culturally globalized. South Korea is one of the world’s most educated societies. Almost 90 percent of South Koreans go on to higher education, a truly staggering figure. Colleges and universities are some of the driving forces of national and local economic development. The confidence and ambition of a rapidly growing economy stand out against the slower pace of more developed economies. In some cases the confidence is played out in massive modernization projects such as the new district of Songdo currently being built near the city of Incheon.

Songdo (Photo: John Rennie Short)

There are also more subtle changes. A more pragmatic attitude to the costs as well as benefits of rapid economic growth is increasingly evident from speaking with the people and listening to their debates. There is fuller reckoning of the colonial legacy of Japanese control, of the collaborations as well as the resistances. While there is justifiable pride in economic achievements, there is a deep sense of the trauma inflicted on the country by the recent history of colonialism, war, and rapid industrialization. There is a palpable grappling with history. Seoul now boasts a new National Museum of Korea and the grand Joseon palaces of Changdeokgung and Gyeongbokgung are refurbished and open to the public.

Ceremony at Gyeongbokgung (Photo: John Rennie Short)

Other visible reminders of the past are not such venerable legacies. You do not have to travel very far from Seoul to see the barbed wire that separates South and North, a developed country from one bordering on mass starvation. Since my last visit, South Korea has prospered while North Korea has spiraled down into even more authoritarian rule, misery and hunger.

Countries are too large to understand and summarize in a quick visit. South Korea seems poised to enter a more settled period in which the legacies of the past and the prospects of the future are now regarded as more nuanced and complex. To visit the emerging city of Incheon or the fast-paced metropolis of Seoul is to get a glimpse of the speed and feel of a high-octane modernity coming to terms with its past and establishing its future role in the world.

East and West: Twenty Years On

Germany. 9 November. Twenty years ago to the day, the Cold War began its final decline with the toppling of the Berlin Wall. I have spent the day in a unified Germany. I crossed the now historical border between East and West when I left Weimar by train very early this morning to arrive at Frankfurt. I arrived last week for a conference about the legacy of the Bauhaus for the contemporary city.

Historic Weimar (Photo: John Rennie Short)

Weimar is at the historical center of German culture. The home of Cranach, Goethe, Schiller and Herder. The town is filled with memories of classic German culture as well fragments of the modern movement. Goethe’s house is a site of pilgrimage. The historic Haus am Horn built in 1923 stands as one of the very earliest examples of modernist domestic architecture. The modern soon turned into the dark and savage. From the Bauhaus studios where Kandinsky, Klee and Moholy-Nagy taught and argued you can see the tall gray memorial tower on the site of Buchenwald concentration camp. A visit was distressing and incomprehensible.

For the past few days the newspapers and television are full of images of the wall falling twenty years ago. East Germans streamed across in their thousands, people started to party and spontaneously chip away with hammers and picks at the symbol of oppression. The integration between East and West is still an ongoing process. Unemployment is still twice as high in the East as in the West. A solidarity tax is still leveled on all citizens to bring the East up to the standard of the West. The legacy of disparity in investment is evident in the newer roofs in the villages and towns of the old West compared to the old East with its abandoned factories and depopulating towns. But there are also signs of a smoothing out. Weimar, formerly in the East, now boasts lots of new buildings and the whole historic center was spiffed up for its designation in 1999 as European Capital of Culture. With more rich elderly West Germans moving in, it is becoming an affluent retirement town.


Bauhaus Weimar (Photo: John Rennie Short)

I spoke with some people who had lived in East Germany. They remember the polluted smell of coal-fired power stations, the lack of goods and the restricted freedoms. But the memories are disappearing from view. Ex-Stasi (secret political police) members are now running for office asking voters to put the past behind them. Early this morning I asked my taxi driver if he could remember the great day twenty years ago. No, he said, I was only five. A new generation is coming of age that only knows one Germany. As the momentous day fades into historical memory we will forget the seeming solidity of what was before.

Socialism for the Very Rich: The Case of Professional Sports in the USA

One of the themes swirling around the current health care debates is the notion of a European socialism. In the standard rhetoric, not just restricted to health care, the pervasive and enervating affects of collective provision of goods and services are contrasted with the dynamism and freedom of pure market mechanisms. Well and good, but why is this model not used in the USA where most markets are dominated by cartels and collusion? Only the ideologues believe in the free market. The rich and powerful do not. And to prove my point I only need to look at professional sports in the USA. ‘Collectivist’ Europe has a fierce market system in the dominant game of soccer. Take the English Premier League (EPL) where at the end of every season the poorest performing teams are relegated to lower divisions, thus losing out on valuable televising rights revenues. The successful teams in the lower leagues move up to the more lucrative divisions in a direct relation between performance and pay. The very successful teams in the EPL get to compete in European-wide competitions where there is an even bigger payout. Competition is used to reward the successful and punish the unsuccessful.

Compare this with the closest USA equivalent, the National Football League. Here poor performance is rewarded not punished. If your team has a lousy season, you get the first round draft picks—the most promising players coming from college—and your schedule is adjusted the next season so you face weaker teams. Getting lower draft picks and a tougher schedule against good teams in contrast punishes the successful teams. The emphasis is on creating parity between teams. Where is the free market? Where is the competition? Relegation for the awful? Forget about it. Lousy teams are never relegated. Owners get to keep their teams in the lucrative TV-revenue sharing deals. The emphasis is on continually leveling the “paying field” so that mediocrity is always rewarded and excellence is always penalized. Of course the whole system is geared so that owners can keep raking in the money no matter how incompetent their franchises. Owners and players are kept in clover with no fear of relegation or revenue loss. Real competition? Forget about it. A monopoly system continually reproduces itself so that the poor and the weak get to stay with the rich and the strong that would have Karl Marx applauding. Sounds like socialism to me. And this same system also extends to baseball and basketball, where we have perennially woeful teams such as the Pittsburgh Pirates in baseball and the LA Clippers in basketball. So let’s bring all this criticism of European-style socialism even closer to home of the professional sports cartels. When the NFL looks like the EPL, that is when people can start speaking about a real market in sports. Until then sit back and watch Europe-style socialism at work in the NFL. To accurately reflect the business model used, the acronym needs to be changed to NSL for the National Socialist League.

And the winner is Rio, or is it Chicago?

Rio is the winner of the competition to host the 2016 Summer Games. The announcement made today from Copenhagen is now being celebrated in Brazil. Sadness reigns in Chicago, and Obama is second-guessing his decision to be the first US President to lobby in person for a US Olympic bid. But are the real winners the cities like Chicago that just failed to win the final nomination?

The Games will come to Rio along with all the costs and benefits. Hosting the Games demands major urban infrastructural investment. For the 1988 games Seoul expanded its airport, built three new subway lines, and cleaned up the polluted Han River. For the 1992 Games, Barcelona built a new waterfront and upgraded a declining area of the city as well as making numerous improvements throughout the metro area including new roads, a new sewer system, and the creation or improvement of over 200 parks, plazas and streets. For 2000 Sydney built a new road linking the airport to the downtown and the main venue on a contaminated inner city site. Athens spent close to $16 billion in large-scale public investments in water supply, mass transit, and airport connections to get ready for the 2004 Games. Beijing undertook a building frenzy with an estimated $40 billion of Olympic-related buildings and infrastructure including a new expressway and ring roads, miles of rail and subway tracks, and a $2.2 billion new airport that is the largest in the world.

The Olympics Games provides both the opportunity and the deadline to implement long-held redevelopment plans. In Greece, for example, the rest of the country had long resisted national investments in Athens. The international showcase of the Olympics provided the necessary spur. The Games start on a specific date with a global audience. The brute reality of such a severe deadline overcomes political resistances, bureaucratic logjams, and administrative inertia. The temporary and permanent greening of the city is also a possibility since the IOC now promotes ‘green’ games. The Sydney Games were held on a former abandoned waste site, Homebush Bay, and the Games were part of a wider urban remediation and greening project.

Are the Games a net cost or a net benefit to the host city? An honest answer has proved elusive. Inclusive cost-benefit analyses are severely hampered by lack of proper accounting methods, technical issues, such as accurately estimating exchange rates of foreign currencies, and such basic issues as the lack of available data. Costing the Olympic Games is a fiscal mystery made more complex by the partisan nature of much of the analyses. Organizations seeking to promote, justify, or attract the Games generate the vast majority of cost cost-benefit analyses. While many studies highlight the positive benefits of the Games (largely funded by organizations and groups seeking to justify the Games), fewer studies examine the costs of the Games and their redistributional consequences. The Games involve massive investments that crowd out other forms of public investment, such as spending on education and social welfare that may serve better the long-term needs of ordinary citizens. Other costs include the dislocation to the city during the construction period and the possibility of increased house prices and rent levels. There are also social and environmental costs that are rarely factored into the standard cost-benefit or economic modeling approaches. A recent report estimates that the staging of the last twenty Olympic Games displaced 20 million people, including the displacement of almost three quarters of a million people for the Seoul Games, 30,000—predominantly African Americans—for the Atlanta Games, and approximately 1.25 million displaced for the Beijing Games.

Objective cost-benefit analysis of hosting the Games remains at a rudimentary stage, with few accurate or comprehensive studies and little comparative data. There is often massive public investment in the Olympic Games that goes unrecorded in most cost-benefit analysis. The existing analyses suggest that the distribution of costs and benefits is regressive with most of the costs borne locally, especially by the more marginal urban residents displaced to make way for the Games, while most of the benefits accrue to local elites and a global media market. The measurement of costs and benefits and their social distribution deserve much more careful analysis.

A reputedly $40 billion Beijing Games raised the stakes: Beijing’s lavish spending and the grand spectaculars of its opening and closing ceremonies all ratchet up the expectations for subsequent Summer Olympics. Hosting the Games provides an opportunity for city reimagining. In the context of a global media spotlight, the spectacular staging of the Games launches the makings of a new city. But these new urban dreams are also fleshed out in the bids of serious candidates. So perhaps Chicago gets to make the dreams of making a better city without having to bear the heavy costs of actually hosting the Olympics.