Bicycle work

I miss having a working bike! I *so* want to take a ride down the Lakefront Train like I used to do when I was living in Rogers Park!

But I did make more progress today. Two days ago, I cleaned the brakes and rear derailleur. Today, I removed the wheels from the frame and cleaned the rims. I also wiped down the accessible parts of the frame and cleaned all the goop off the front sprockets. Those rims are shiny now! There's still dirt worn into minor grooves on the sides though. I may have to think about new rims at some point; they can actually wear through the sides and crack.

It looks like the problem is that the freehub is jammed and won't spin independently of the wheel like it's supposed to. I'm not sure if that's fixable or not, but I'll hopefully find out at The Recyclery tomorrow. If not, it's probably a $25 part. I also need to replace the chain and the rear cassette anyway. I got on the bike and rode around the parking lot briefly after putting the wheels back on. My winter bike, Percy, is great, but I've really missed this one; I'm looking forward to getting it into shape again.

Keeping the bike in the foyer of Miriam's condo was really a pain for everybody, so her hatchback is going to be a bike shed. This is a relatively low crime area, there are other (easier to steal) bikes around to serve as ablative armor, and you'd have to be near the car and looking down through the window to see there's a bike. I think it should be safe. I hope....

David Harvey's "Rebel Cities"

I finished reading "Rebel Cities." I guess I was hoping for a sort of direct plan of action for creating resistance to neoliberal trends in an urban context. It's not really that, at least partly because, as Harvey notes, there's isn't a simple plan.

Discussion of the tension between cities as fungible commodities vs cities as unique sites with unique resources was interesting. He discusses the the way "monopoly rent" (that is, rent or value related to uniqueness) is important to capitalist practice, and that cities are being positioned (or positioning themselves) as sites of authenticity and uniqueness in order to be attractive. But when authenticity is commodified, it undermines itself. These sorts of cracks, he says, are where anti-capitalist resistance can make room for itself.

His discussion of the need for activists on the left to look beyond horizontal, non-hierarchical organization is really interesting stuff too. I'm someone who tends to romanticize the structure of groups like Food Not Bombs or Occupy Wall Street, or even the Rainbow Family of Living Light; groups that are radically democratic and without a power structure. But of course, all groups have power structures, whether explicit and formal or implicit and informal. And without a formalized structure of power, organization fails beyond a local scale.

Harvey looks at a couple of case studies demonstrating some of his points. His mentions of the Zapatista autonomous zone was interesting to me. The fact that I've been to Chiapas, talked with some of the Zapatista compañeras and compañeros, and seen (in a very superficial way) the working of a couple of Zapatista communities helped contextualize Harvey's observations. I think I should write an email to the professor who organized that trip and tell her how much I feel I've learned from it in some very indirect ways. Anyway, Harvey points out the problems of trying to interact with the external capitalist world when, as a group, you have rejected all capitalist structure. It was a point I wondered about while in Chiapas and afterward. How can you be truly independent and autonomous while still being enmeshed in larger infrastructural systems of economy, electricity, petroleum products, and more? These things are complicated, but I feel like creating an autonomous zone can't be a permanent solution. It needs to go somewhere from there, and I'm not sure where.

Rebel Cities had a lot to say both about cities specifically, and about neoliberal economics and politics in general. It wasn't quite what I was expecting. It was worthwhile reading, but left me with more questions than answers.

Well, next I'm going to read Keller Easterling's "Extrastatecraft."

Maps and the Changing Landscape

A stalled construction project left a big hole in the ground in the middle of Nashville. It has now been there long enough, full of rainwater, that it appears as a water body on Google Maps.

That's fascinating to me, especially after comparing so many plat maps of southeastern Wisconsin across a century. Water bodies change a lot, due to both natural causes and human intervention. As the scale on which our construction operates becomes larger, and the time scales of change grow shorter, and the line between natural and artificial feature blurs, how long should a feature be around before it gets added to maps? Or is it a matter of how long it's expected to be around? Does the current digital paradigm of mapmaking, allowing swift and easy editing of features, affect what we choose to include or exclude from maps? How does this apply to maps featuring socially constructed place-definitions?

http://www.citylab.com/weather/2015/05/stalled-development-created-an-accidental-lake-in-nashville/393941/?utm_source=SFFB