Comment by kapitza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kapitza | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

From your link:

Urban decay (also known as urban rot and urban blight) is the process whereby a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. It may feature deindustrialization, depopulation or changing population, restructuring, abandoned buildings, high local unemployment, fragmented families, political disenfranchisement, crime, and a desolate, inhospitable city landscape.

And:

Urban decay has no single cause; it results from combinations of inter-related socio-economic conditions—including the city's urban planning decisions, tight rent control, the poverty of the local populace, the construction of freeway roads and rail road lines that bypass the area, depopulation by suburbanization of peripheral lands, real estate neighborhood redlining, and immigration restrictions.

Highly elucidating, I'm sure you'll agree! Imagine a page on potato blight that read:

Potato blight has no single cause -- it results from combinations of inter-related agricultural conditions, including...

In related news:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

Here's a page talking about two different things that are both called potato blight...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora_infestans

(It's again a link from the first link)

Is it so strange that a borrowed word ended up having a slightly different taxonomic breadth?

No -- what's strange is that a monumental historical event, which happened in the lives of those now living, and caused immense destruction and immense sorrow to many human beings, is not attributed to any clear cause, or human institution, or organization, or even ideology.

Unlike potato blight, which is caused by one or more well-described organisms whose DNA can even be sequenced.

This is very much the kind of intentional forgetting practiced by many post-genocidal societies. It's very similar to the way Indonesians remember the 1965 massacres, or even the way Chinese remember the Cultural Revolution. There's simply a broad social agreement that "we don't talk about these things."

But here, let me help you out with that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Ground_(book)

https://www.amazon.com/Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Ethnic-Clean...

It's very reassuring, however, to note that Detroit is now "one of the hottest food cities." I'll be sure to check out one of those New American bistros next time I'm on Linnhurst.

There are a ton of papers analyzing what happened to Detroit and comparing it to various other times those factors happened to similar cities.

But like most big things, there isn't a single cause, exact duplicates are hard to find (ie, most other cities had only one of the factors), etc.

Detroit is just that patient who managed to have a weak immune system, a genetic predisposition to respond to a byproduct of the bacteria, and managed to catch a rare bacteria. They're an outlier, and we can't pin it on a single factor what happened to them.

But we can still list off the half-dozen social issues that manged to converge at once and how their various interplays accelerated the issue.

Ed:

Consider what happened to bananas -- it wasn't just the infectuous agent, it was the large monoculture farms and trade practices which enabled it, and any analysis dependant on just the most proximate cause won't capture the whole picture.

Also, bats and cave explorers + tourists.

You illustrate the point exactly. Maybe it would be clearer with a little more detail on the "potato blight" analogy.

Here are two kinds of statement:

"Potato blight" has no single cause -- it results from combinations of inter-related agricultural conditions, including rainy summers, witchcraft, overworked soils, and God's wrath at our tolerance for rampant homosexuality.

"Potato blight" is the common name for a plant disease, usually caused by the organism Phytophthora infestans.

The first statement, just in its form, is essentially pre-scientific, pre-rational thinking, which has been the norm for most of human history. Parts of it may be true in some sense. Pretty much none of it is in any way testable.

The second is a scientific statement at least in form -- it may or may not be accurate, but that's easy to check.

Occam's basic point was that when you propose a complex, multi-causal explanation of a discrete syndrome, against an alternative hypothesis which is parsimonious, precise and uni-causal, the Bayesian prior of the complex hypothesis should be very low.

In this case, we have a multi-causal explanation of a historical mass migration. To my mind, the causal null hypothesis for any urban decline or mass migration, past or present, is: the city fell into ruins because the people who lived there left. The people left because, due to political or military forces, they became afraid for their physical safety. In short, ethnic cleansing.

This simple uni-causal explanation is amply confirmed by anecdotal evidence from the period. Or you could accept Wikipedia's multi-causal explanation, which to my eye is basically zoning changes, the phase of the moon and maybe even God's wrath.

But, sure, there are a ton of papers. Bear in mind: in 1405, there were a ton of papers as well.

White flight was an exercise of economic power by the people that left.

Wow. To paraphrase Walter Sobchak: say what you want about Marxism. But at least it's an ethos.

I don't know this, but let's suppose that by your use of this term "exercise of economic power", you imply some moral sense in which the action is unrighteous or unjust. Right? (Bear in mind that, of course, from the opposite perspective, it sounds a lot like "blaming the victim.")

Consider a not hugely dissimilar migration that happened around the same time: the migration of French Algerians to metropolitan France. Here's a short Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oran_massacre_of_1962

Totally serious, non-rhetorical question: would you categorize this historical event as "exercise of economic power" or as "ethnic cleansing?"

Also, is there any generalization that can be drawn across the political systems in which these two events happened (decline of Detroit, independence of Algeria)? Or is it just a coincidence that they both go down in the '60s?

People weren't forced out, many of those that had resources chose to leave. That's not a cleansing.

I'm not sure what to make of you comparing several hundred thousand people moving to a new location to a mass murder.

Do you somehow think that deaths from murder were a major contributor to the changing demographics of Detroit?

Uh, no, if several hundred thousand people were murdered, that would be a massacre.

If they left because they were afraid of being murdered (or otherwise violated in their physical safety), that would be ethnic cleansing.

Do you not believe this applies to those who left Detroit, or Algeria? Really? Is it not the case that every country and major city outside East Asia contains areas where residing would endanger you? Including... most of Detroit? Could you seriously be this good and innocent a person?

Note also that it takes a lot less physical menace to drive out Ward and June Cleaver, than Dylan "YOLO" Hipster. Of course, Ward and June were privileged...

That isn't the definition of ethnic cleansing.

(usually involves force and systematic exercise of that force)

Crime isn't force? Withholding protection from crime isn't systematic?

When Milosevic went to cleanse Kosovo, he didn't send the Yugoslav Army to put people in cattle cars. He just let Arkan's Tigers do whatever. Arkan got the message and so did the Albanians:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkan

Reply on news.ycombinator.com