Quartz: Italian is the fastest dying language in the US

From 2001 to 2017, the number of Americans speaking Italian at home dropped from almost 900,000 to just over 550,000, an incredible 38% reduction in just 16 years. Among languages with at least 100,000 US speakers in 2001, no language saw a larger decrease, in either absolute or percentage terms—though Hungarian was close by percentage. The data is from the US Census. [...]

The first one is very simple. There are many fewer Italian-born residents of the US today. The population fell from about 530,000 in 2001 to under 400,000 in 2017. This explains about 40% of the fall in Italian speakers. The lack of migration to the US is largely due to the increasing prosperity of Italy across second half of the 20th century—while US GDP per person was almost double that of Italy in 1960, it is only about 50% greater today. [...]

The other 60% of the fall is mostly accounted for by assimilation. From 1930 to 1970, there were more foreign-born residents of the US from Italy than any other country. As these immigrants die and their descendants start families in which they speak primarily English, the number of Italian speakers dwindles further. The number of German speakers in the US is falling for similar reasons.

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Quartz: A small-town businessman’s quest to protect India’s elephants, one photo at a time

This region of West Bengal has for long been part of the migratory route for elephants, but as the Birsa Munda Halt railway platform shows, human interventions are increasingly challenging the survival of the species.

“…if this platform was built 100 metres in other direction, then the elephant corridor would’ve been saved,” Hazra told Quartz. “…it’s a platform in the middle of the forest, and one train passes through it without stopping… at the ticket counter, the fans, electricity wire, switches, everything has been nicked. Even the gate is missing. Only the platform remains.” [...]

“Earlier they used to migrate to West Bengal and then return (to Jharkhand). But over a period of time, maybe over the last 10 years, the return is not happening for various reasons,” Mohanty told Quartz. Chief among them are the construction of a canal system, mining and other industrial activities, besides expanded human settlements and cultivation. As a result, Mohanty says, the feeding habits of elephants have also evolved, and they now like to eat the cash crops of sugarcane and potatoes grown year-round by the farmers in the region.

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CityLab: Spain Wants to Ban Cars in Dozens of Cities, and the Public’s on Board

That’s sure to be welcome news to Spain’s current government as it drafts a law on that matter. It’s an effort that could ban all but zero-emissions vehicles in the center of any town of over 50,000 residents by 2025, a ruling that would apply to 138 cities across the country. The first of those zones has in fact just arrived: On Friday, central Madrid became an ultra-low emissions zone, protected against pollution and congestion by the toughest restrictions on cars in place on a large scale in any major European city.

These restrictions will transform the way Madrileños get around their city, and will no doubt require some public readjustment. They are nonetheless popular, with 64 percent of people in the city supporting the move, on par with Catalonia’s 65 percent favorability of such restrictions. Galicia’s even higher rates could be boosted by the demonstrated success of pedestrianization in the city of Pontevedra. [...]

One single square kilometer at the heart of Madrid’s new car-free zone is home to almost 45,000 people, almost three times as many residents as in the most densely populated square kilometer of Oslo. Spanish suburbs, meanwhile, are often denser than many North American downtowns, with large numbers of people living in taller buildings and more likely to be exposed to road traffic. The issue of pollution in dense urban areas is thus a central one to a large section of the population. It may not be a coincidence that the only major European city to have something similar to Madrid’s ultra-low emissions zone is Paris, the only other European metropolis to match Spain’s urban densities. And while Paris’s restrictions on more heavily polluting vehicles have come to be accepted as normal, its restrictions on car access to some central streets has proved extremely contentious.

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CityLab: How to Create Safer Public Housing Projects

Scenes like the one Mata describes also form the prevailing media image of low-income housing developments. But a new study of San Antonio suggests that, despite its fearsome reputation, most low-income housing isn’t dangerous at all, either to residents or neighbors who live nearby. The great majority of crime in the city’s projects is concentrated in just a few high-risk developments.

When researchers Marie Skubak Tillyer and Rebecca Walter looked at data from the San Antonio Housing Authority, they found that 72 percent of violent crime, 87 percent of drug crime, and 72 percent of property crime occurred at just 5 percent of all properties, the study, published by Crime and Delinquency, reports. “It’s not the case that they’re all sort of equally dangerous,” Tillyer told me. “A small proportion of places account for an overwhelming majority of crime.”

These findings are consistent with a wide range of previous research on crime and place. It turns out that low-income housing developments that are “hot spots” for crime tend to share certain characteristics. Some are large-scale, structural factors, like concentrated disadvantage and residential instability in the properties’ surrounding neighborhoods. But others are smaller-scale—and more easily fixable—matters of place, like a lack of basic security and design features. The study looked at the presence of practical (if depressingly carceral-seeming) features like secured entrances, strongly enforced visitor policies, bars or lattices on the windows, surveillance cameras, and routine patrols. The safer developments were equipped with more of them; the more dangerous ones had fewer.

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The Calvert Journal: Karol Palka

Edifice by Polish photographer Karol Palka is a visual journey through the interiors of communist-era buildings in Poland, Slovakia and East Germany. It includes shots of the Polana Hotel, an example of Socialist Realist architecture once owned by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and visited by Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, now a disused office building for the management of the Nowa Huta Steelworks. The series tells a story about power and its impermanence; an edifice which once provided shelter, security and a feeling of strength reveals itself to be illusory, its power transitory. The spectre of its downfall is always near, lurking just around the corner, behind the cold walls of grandiose ideas.

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