The more things change...

Via kottke, the New Republic has an article about Chicago's transformation into a European-style (or, for that matter, Latin American-style) central city.

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.

My Chicago years coincided with the overhaul of the South Loop. My first month there, a local friend freaked when he learned I'd gone to the Burnham Plaza to watch a movie. Four years later Mrs. Daley was living in a new condo right around the corner; the Burnham is now closed.

Will the new demographics be dynamic, creating physical and financial centripetal motion towards the city center just as newcomers continue to fill the outlying areas? Or will they be static, like the northern suburbs of Paris or the favelas of Rio? Whatever the result, it is likely to be magnified by American racial politics, and that doesn't give much cause for hope. The young professionals now flocking to the central city, after all, are the children and grandchildren of the white middle class that fled to the suburbs during the 1950s. The effects of white flight were disastrous to the Black and Hispanic communities then; the effects of white return are not likely to benefit them now.
 

Teach the controversy!

There are plenty of witty t-shirt sites on the Internets, and most are occasionally funny. But this is a minor masterpiece.



The geocentric model shirt will also be a hit among those interested in Adam Smith's exhaustive treatment of epicycles.



And many more!