Another week of Fulton vs. Kotkin

[tags]los angeles, urban planning, bill fulton, joel kotkin[/tags]

The war of wits between Bill Fulton and Joel Kotkin continues. Their feud was meme-checked in “Pasadena, not Manhattan,” and the background links are on that post.

Fulton volleys with part two of a three-part blog, “De-Kotkinizing the planning debate.” He starts with praising Kotkin’s earlier works, including “The City: A Global History“. Then Fulton continues to jab Kotkin, this time criticizing him for becoming increasingly careless as he has taken his urban planning medicine show to the masses through op-eds and speaking engagements.

Over half of Fulton’s entry praises Kotkin in some form:

Let’s start with the serious stuff. His recent book, The City: A Global History, is actually a pretty good read. … The first is that it’s very short – only 160 pages – and for that reason it’s kind of a Cliff Notes version of the history of cities. Much of the book consists of bite-sized descriptions of various cities at various points in history, and in contrast to the typical Kotkin attitude on the op-ed pages, it’s written in a pretty straightforward fashion. In fact, there’s a certain uncharacteristic humility about the entire book … .
and
Similarly, when he is paired on a research project with a rigorous statistical analyst … Kotkin writes pretty responsibly based on real data. His recent Brookings paper … is a good example. It argues that the inland areas of California, especially in the Inland Empire and the Central Valley, represent a completely different part of California than coastal Southern California and the Bay Area, and must deal with problems differently.

Then comes more criticism:

Knowing that this fine body of work exists makes it all the more frustrating when you read a Kotkin op-ed or hear a Kotkin speech. The outlines of his ideas are still there, but only in the most cartoonish form. And for somebody who once wrote a book called The New Geography, he’s surprisingly sloppy with his geographical facts. Especially in speeches, but also in more popular writing, he tends to throw around place-names like a hip-hop artist – playing off cities’ stereotyped reputation for shock value, rather than grounding the references in actual fact. …
and
This kind of carelessness shows up in speeches as well. Speaking engagements are where pundits make their real money, and so there’s a lot of pressure to be provocative. Furthermore, most speeches are still not recorded or put on the Internet, so there’s a natural tendency to play fast and loose with the facts to make a provocative point. It’s unlikely that anyone will call you on it.

Fulton promises to address Kotkin’s criticism of Richard Florida’s work in the coda.