Jacobin Magazine: It’s Not Just the Drug War

The African-American incarceration rate of about 2,300 per 100,000 people is clearly off the charts and a shocking figure. The black-white incarceration rate in the United States is about 6 to 1. Focusing so intently on these racial disparities often obscures the fact that the incarceration rates for other groups in the United States, including whites and Latinos, is also comparatively very high, just not astronomically high as in the case of blacks. [...]

Even if you released every African American from US prisons and jails today, we’d still have a mass incarceration crisis in this country. I do not mean to minimize the enormity of the problem of the carceral state for African Americans but rather to make a larger point about how we need to think about racial disparities and criminal justice in a more nuanced way and in a wider context.[...]

The lack of a consensus on what caused the alarming increase in violent crime opened up enormous space to redefine the “law-and-order” problem and its solutions. Foes of civil rights increasingly sought to associate concerns about crime with anxieties about racial disorder, the transformation of the racial status quo, and wider political turmoil, including the wave of urban unrest and riots and the huge demonstrations against the Vietnam War that gripped the country in the 1960s and 1970s.

The construction of the carceral state was deeply bipartisan from early on and not merely a case of New Democrats like Bill Clinton belatedly following in the punitive footsteps laid down decades earlier by Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, and other leading Republicans. [...]

As I explain in my previous book, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America, some key social movements and liberal interest groups, including the victims’ rights movement, women’s movement, prisoners’ rights movement, and the anti-death penalty movement, developed in ways that reinforced the punitive turn in penal policy.

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Quartz: Everything we thought we knew about the gig economy is wrong

The share of people working in “alternative” work arrangements, an important government measure of the prevalence of “gig” work, is shrinking rather than rising, according to newly released BLS data. Alternative in this case means people who are not employed directly or regularly at the place they usually work, including independent contractors and temp workers.

The new data show that the share of Americans in gig work fell to 10.1% of the labor force last year, from 10.9% in 2005, the last time the BLS studied these work arrangements. This challenges research from renowned economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard and Alan Krueger of Princeton, who estimated in December 2016 that alternative work had jumped to 15.8% of all workers, accounting for almost all of US job creation since 2005.

Independent contract work saw the largest decline. Contractors accounted for 7.4% of all workers in 2005, but just 6.9% in 2017. The share of workers in temp jobs, on the books of contract firms, or who work on-call held steady between 2005 and 2017.

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Quartz: The first 3D printed houses for rent will be built in the Netherlands this year

That’s the solution the Dutch construction company Van Wijnen and researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands came up with. The city of Eindhoven soon hopes to boast the world’s first commercially-developed 3D-printed homes, an endeavor known as Project Milestone. [...]

“The first aim of the project is to build five great houses that are comfortable to live in and will have happy occupants,” developers say. Beyond that, they hope to promote 3D concrete printing science and technology so that printed housing “will soon be a reality that is widely adopted.”

The “printer” in this case is a big robotic arm that will shape cement of a light, whipped-cream consistency, based on an architect’s design. The cement is layered for strength.  [...]

These futuristic homes, chosen for development by the Eindhoven municipality during Dutch Design Week 2016, will be part of an architectural “sculpture garden” in the green neighborhood. Eventually, the developers hope to 3D print and construct many more odd dwellings onsite in Bosrijk and beyond.

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Atlas Obscura: Revisiting the Heyday of California’s ‘Crazy’ Novelty Architecture

The unusual businesses he saw weren’t on some Hollywood backlot, but were California’s classic coterie of mimetic architecture—that is, buildings shaped like, well, anything but buildings. According to Cristina Carbone, a professor of art and architectural history at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, the practice dates back to at least the Renaissance. By the 18th century, says Carbone, who is working on a book on the style, English gardens were sprinkled with follies, such as dining pavilions masquerading as pagodas, churches, and pyramids. In America, the first known example—a six-story wooden elephant named Lucy—rose over the seaside community of Margate, New Jersey, in 1881.

When this style of vernacular architecture landed in California a few decades later, it emerged into a sea of mission-inspired structures. But soon, these roadside curiosities—built with a wink and a whole lot of plaster—were perhaps more densely clustered there than in anywhere else in the world.  [...]

As California’s open spaces were tamed by roads and cars, business owners scrambled to find ways to entice drivers to pull off the highways and reach for their wallets. Automobiles became more widely accessible after World War I, and “the middle class was able to get out, and that had never happened before,” Carbone says. Mimetic buildings were, for a time, a useful tactic—both functional architecture and large, loud advertisement. “If Californians were going to be fully committed to this ‘automania,’” Gebhard writes, “then why not cultivate a set of architectural images which would instantly catch the eye, and which we would continue to remember?” These buildings were “not necessarily near anything terrifically important,” Carbone says, but they could draw the attention of drivers just passing through.

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CityLab: This Circular Bridge Actually Has a Point

A new bridge spanning (or circumnavigating) Laguna Garzón, a coastal lagoon in southeastern Uruguay, poses just that question. It’s a circular bridge, or rather two joined semicircular bridges, that crosses the lagoon, which runs along the border of the states of Maldonado and Rocha. At a glance, it’s the sort of ridiculousness that you might expect of a bridge in London.  [...]

Uruguay’s bridge also smacks of iconic-architecture-posing-as-infrastructure. The circular bridge only cost $11 million, and Constantini, the Argentinian developer, picked up about $10 million of that price. That’s the point, according to the Architect’s Newspaper: Constantini owns property in Rocha, where development has been considerably slower than in Maldonado.  

Viñoly’s bridge ought to do the trick. But to his credit, the excesses of this pretty bridge serve a larger aim. Just like a roundabout, it will slow down drivers heading over the environmentally sensitive lagoon, while providing new pavilions and views for pedestrians and adding to the simple beauty of the land.

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