I approached the island at high tide. Water lapped at the edge of the roadside, following a narrow six-mile strip of land showcasing an untouched part of Georgia’s low country. The shadow from a Civil War-era lighthouse —abandoned and surrounded by water on the south channel of the Savannah River — pointed towards the Atlantic Ocean as I crossed one final bridge underneath the mid-morning sun.
My car hit solid ground on the island and I passed the welcome sign, only this one had a twist: “Welcome Back!” it said, not “Welcome to…”. Repeat visitors were assumed.
Twenty miles east of historic Savannah, Tybee Island rests between the prominent barrier islands of Hilton Head and the Golden Isles of Georgia. For those who can pull away from the 18th century colonial homes and clatter of horse-drawn carriages, all enveloped under Savannah’s timeless Spanish moss, the city’s closest beachfront destination paints a striking contrast to many of its peers in the southeast.
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(Source: theislandreview.com)
I was alone at an airport—literally alone, not a person in sight. Aimlessly pacing the premises, I passed an abandoned snack stand with assorted candy and Pringles behind a scratched plexi-glass wall. Blue metal chairs lined the damp concrete floor. A stiff breeze swept in from a set of open-air entryways and tossed an empty candy bar wrapper towards the high, paint-chipped ceilings. I watched the wrapper slowly make its way back down to earth—readying itself for another haphazard flight.
Placing my backpack down, I rummaged around for my connecting flight itinerary. Six more hours. I stomped my feet to regain circulation and pulled my jacket higher up on my neck—futile efforts to combat the cold bite of Peru’s “Windy City”.
As public institutions around the country consider privatizing certain assets in an effort to save money, the discussion has occasionally moved to environments where, for better or worse, Americans spend an inordinate amount of time: Parking lots.
Ohio State University, for instance, plans on leasing its parking to outside operators — a policy that has drawn criticism for potentially allowing a private company to benefit at the expense of drivers. But if improving the parking situation is one of the goals of handing over control of the lots, why not take this opportunity to rethink not only who runs public parking, but how. As universities and cities hand over the keys to their asphalt kingdom, why not negotiate higher—and greener—standards for the privatized lots?
Think about it: When was the last time you actually noticed a parking lot? MIT Professor of Urban Planning Eran Ben-Joseph recently pointed out an eye-opening if not-too-shocking fact: Parking lots in the United States could cover the entire island of Puerto Rico. For an island’s worth of parking lots, few (if any) seem to stand out from the crowd.
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It felt like a rodeo. The car bounced and my head met the top of the car. Another pothole—rather, a small crater, came into view as I cursed at my too-tall-for-foreign-cars frame.
Leading into the interior of Colombia, the road was battered from years of neglect and heavy rainfall. I left the coastal city of Cartagena hours earlier in a shared taxi heading to Santa Cruz de Mompox, or simply Mompos, a lazy river town best known as the staging ground for Simon Bolivar’s revolution in 1812.
Victor, a quiet local visiting family in Mompos, occupied the passenger seat and knew our driver, a veteran of the road named Freddy. Narrow and unmarked, the road’s uneven surface tossed my body like a ragdoll in a rusted Isuzu SUV in dire need of new shocks.
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What do Houston, Dallas, Stuttgart, and Stockholm have in common? The four cities are the only metropolitan areas in the United States and Western Europe with economic growth worthy of a top-40 worldwide ranking in a recent study by Brookings. The study, which analyzes growth rates of GDP per capita and employment in the largest 200 worldwide metro economies, found 90% of the top quintile comes from regions not typically associated with robust economic activity.
The findings are telling of the global economy. From Latin American cities such as Lima and Bogota to Warsaw and Bucharest in Eastern Europe, most top-40 performing cities are newcomers to the upper echelon of economic growth rankings. So too are the basement dwellers, as cities such as San Francisco and Liverpool find themselves relegated to bottom-twenty status.
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“Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic… We have the ability to do both good and evil, and more often than not, we choose the good. When we don’t, neither we nor our imagined audience is troubled, because we are able to articulate ourselves to ourselves, and because we have, through our other decisions, merited their sympathy. They are ready to believe the best about us, and not without good reason. From my point of view, thinking about the story of my life, even without claiming any especially heightened sense of ethics, I am satisfied that I have hewed close to the good. And so, what does it mean when, in someone else’s version, I am the villain?”
Teju Cole - Open City
— Teju Cole - Open City
