Dynamic genome evolution in a model fern

The large size and complexity of most fern genomes have hampered efforts to elucidate fundamental aspects of fern biology and land plant evolution through genome-enabled research. Here we present a chromosomal genome assembly and associated methylome, transcriptome and metabolome analyses for the model fern species Ceratopteris richardii. The assembly reveals a history of remarkably dynamic genome evolution including rapid changes in genome content and structure following the most recent whole-genome duplication approximately 60 million years ago. These changes include massive gene loss, rampant tandem duplications and multiple horizontal gene transfers from bacteria, contributing to the diversification of defence-related gene families. The insertion of transposable elements into introns has led to the large size of the Ceratopteris genome and to exceptionally long genes relative to other plants. Gene family analyses indicate that genes directing seed development were co-opted from those controlling the development of fern sporangia, providing insights into seed plant evolution. Our findings and annotated genome assembly extend the utility of Ceratopteris as a model for investigating and teaching plant biology

Replacing the services sector and three-sector theory: urbanization and control as economic sectors

Developed during the Second World War, ‘three-sector theory’ popularized the notion of the ‘services’ sector. It has quietly underpinned understandings of economic structure ever since. The limitations and influence of this basic breakdown have led to many critiques and extensions, but no replacements. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution (1968), we develop a four-sector model that replaces services with sectors focused on urbanization and control. We argue that this model is a better reflection of material economic life, and a more useful way of approaching the 21st-century economy. It also offers scholars of urbanization and regional development a creative new way of seeing urbanization

There Goes the 'Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up by Lance Freeman

One of the challenges in reviewing the work of a prominent author in any field is the tendency to review the author and not the book. This is especially true in the case of Lance Freeman's new book, There Goes the 'Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up, for Freeman holds a very important place in the recent debates about gentrification within the academy. On his own and together with Frank Braconi, Freeman was the author of two important studies in 2004 and 2005 which used quantitative statistical research to demonstrate the authors' claim that there is a tenuous relationship between gentrification and displacement (Freeman and Braconi 2004; Freeman 2005). This research, which garnered national attention (including front page coverage in USA Today), was celebrated by the right and excoriated by the left, and helped thrust Freeman into the spotlight

The Long Road from Babylon to Brentwood: Crisis and Restructuring in the San Francisco Bay Area

Communities on the fringes of the American metropolis – exurbs, or exurbia – have recently garnered attention as the centers of the foreclosure crisis and its aftermath. On the one hand, this attention to the urban nature of the crisis is welcome, as the metamorphosis of the mortgage fiasco into a financial crisis cum global economic meltdown turned popular attention away from the urban roots of this calamity. But this emphasis on the exurbs as the site of crisis lends itself to the misconception that they are the sole source of crisis, rather than the restructuring of the metropolis as a whole. Using a mixture of ethnography, history and journalism, this paper weaves together the story of how the San Francisco Bay Area was restructured over the course of the past thirty years in a way that produced not only a new map of urban and exurban segregation, but the roots of the crisis itself. Working across multiple scales, it examines how three interwoven factors – demographics, policy and capital – each reacted to the landscape inherited at the end of the 1970’s, moving about the region in new ways, leaving some places thriving and others struggling with foreclosure, plummeting property values and the deep uncertainty of the current American metropolis

Vaya Con Dios, Kaye

This issue of the Berkeley Planning Journal is dedicated to Kaye Bock, the longtime Student Affairs Officer for the Department of City and Regional Planning here at Berkeley. Kaye's death came as a shock to the Berkeley planning community; staff, faculty, students and the roughly 1,000 planners that have survived their planning education in no small part due to Kaye's seemingly endless supply of caring, creativity, and know- how, plus her unwavering determination that you succeed no matter the barriers that you may face

All Urban Problems now Problem Spaces

The International Association of Urban Intellectuals, meeting this week for their 112'h global symposium at the Walter Benjamin Conference Center in Paris, announced that forthwith all problems associated with urbanization and metropolitan living would be converted to problem spaces. The change will go into effect on January 1", leading some to specl}late about the challenges faced by cities and their residents in anticipation of the conversion. Discursive shifts of this sort, while not unprecedented, often come with significant epistemological and pecuniary costs, including altering one's outlook on daily urban living and buying lots of new books

The Gringos are Coming, The Gringos are Coming...

Mexico is seeing an unprecedented wave of Americans moving south of the border, many of whom are retirees. Rather than grapple with the either the physical or cultural impact that this migration will have on Mexico, most commentators have resorted to bombastic discourse of invasion. Yet rather than dismiss the hyperbole outright, the author argues that perhaps there is something to be learned from the rhetoric, for it anchors us in the history of Las Californias and allows us to question the utility of the border in the modern age

Beyond Chapala and Cancún: Grappling with the Impact of American Migration to Mexico

Over the past two decades, a twist in the migratory relationship between Mexico and the United States has begun to attract the attention of policy makers and scholars: a growing stream of people moving permanently or semi-permanently from the United States to Mexico. The general understanding of this phenomenon until recently has been that these migrants are wealthy retirees moving to isolated resort-type complexes in beach cities. However, the present paper demonstrates that the migration is actually heterogeneous in terms of its people, places and impacts. Thus, we argue that study of the phenomenon must be expanded to include not only a better understanding of the migrants themselves, but also the impacts on the receiving localities. To this end, we propose a framework for a research agenda, creating a typology of receiving places and the settlements within these places

The Long Road From Babylon To Brentwood: Crisis and Restructuring in the San Francisco Bay Area

AbstractThis dissertation integrates policy analysis, archival research, ethnographic field work, GIS mapping and statistical analysis to build a broad geo-historical understanding of the role of planning, policy, capital and race in the production of the foreclosure crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area. It begins from the premise that an explanation of the foreclosure crisis that focuses solely on either finance capital or the action of homeowners misses the critical importance of history, geography and planning to the production of crisis. The specific and racialized historical geography of the initial wave of foreclosure in the Bay Area, which like in Southern California is particularly concentrated in newly built suburban and exurban areas which are exceptionally diverse, is evidence of the deeper role of two generations of urban development, regional economics and planning politics in what is too often cast as a `housing problem.' This dissertation argues that thinking about the current problem as an urban crisis forces us to reexamine the dysfunctionality of planning politics at every scale and the reality of a metropolitan geography where hyper-diverse demographic and economic sprawl and geopolitical fragmentation is a historical fact rather than a pending reality. What emerges is an understanding of fragmentation which pushes beyond the state, forcing us to confront a deeper set of divisions based on race, class, environmentalism and capitalist development, divisions which have undermined the urban project that is California and raised serious questions about both resilience and citizenship in the 21st century.The text is constructed in a way that the form itself works to develop a more holistic and grounded way of approaching the regional nature of urban development and the complex politics of regional governance. It begins with a historiography of the Bay Area, one that challenges conceptions of sprawl and fragmentation. It then examines the demographic restructuring of the region through a combination of census data analysis using GIS and ethnographic interviews, arguing that the changes in the region both blurred the lines of traditional American racial segregation which simultaneously producing a more "mobile" form of segregation on a megaregional scale. From this historical and geographic foundation, the argument is built to mimic, in a sense, the scales of the crisis itself. Chapter Three begins a more intense focus on planning institutions, the politics of development and shifting urban economics to show the interaction between decisions and events in eastern Contra Costa County, a portion of the region that saw dramatic growth and a stunning collapse over the past thirty years. This chapter focuses intently on planning, both on the plans that were approved and implemented and ones that died before either approval or implementation, with an eye for the vastly different playing field that these communities faced compared with ones which developed during earlier eras. This focus remains in Chapter Four, which examines the often ignored scale of the county to better understand the production of "edge cities" in Contra Costa County, developments which both restructured the region's labor markets and helped contribute to the growing stagnation of the politics of development. Chapter Five returns to the regional scale, focusing on race and the collective failure of both regional and local institutions to adequately solve the problems of inner core poverty inherited from the postwar era, problems which provided the demographic push for much of eastern Contra Costa County's demographic growth. Chapter Six focuses on the megaregional scale beyond the formal confines of the Bay Area, a challenging level of analysis because of its physical and human scale and lack of political and planning institutions, but made necessary by the fact that this is where the growth - and the foreclosures - are most notable. Finally, the conclusion examines the politics of race and development in the state of California, an analysis which illustrates and critiques the narrowed possibilities inherent to planning during this era. This scalar approach illustrates the broad collective responsibility for the production of crisis, where public and private, local and nonlocal, individual and collective actors all played a role in bringing the Bay Area to this point. It also points to three linked conclusions critical to the future of planning: the need to rethink the state-centered conception of planning, which has never held in the United States; the need to accept and work within the historically fragmented and multi-polar system of cities which has defined places like the San Francisco Bay Area since their founding; and the need to push for a broader and deeper conception of institutional responsibility, where institutions involved in the intentional production of space at all scales and in all sectors - i.e. planners - take responsibility for the "common purpose" that is urbanization and development

The Long Road From Babylon To Brentwood: Crisis and Restructuring in the San Francisco Bay Area

AbstractThis dissertation integrates policy analysis, archival research, ethnographic field work, GIS mapping and statistical analysis to build a broad geo-historical understanding of the role of planning, policy, capital and race in the production of the foreclosure crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area. It begins from the premise that an explanation of the foreclosure crisis that focuses solely on either finance capital or the action of homeowners misses the critical importance of history, geography and planning to the production of crisis. The specific and racialized historical geography of the initial wave of foreclosure in the Bay Area, which like in Southern California is particularly concentrated in newly built suburban and exurban areas which are exceptionally diverse, is evidence of the deeper role of two generations of urban development, regional economics and planning politics in what is too often cast as a `housing problem.' This dissertation argues that thinking about the current problem as an urban crisis forces us to reexamine the dysfunctionality of planning politics at every scale and the reality of a metropolitan geography where hyper-diverse demographic and economic sprawl and geopolitical fragmentation is a historical fact rather than a pending reality. What emerges is an understanding of fragmentation which pushes beyond the state, forcing us to confront a deeper set of divisions based on race, class, environmentalism and capitalist development, divisions which have undermined the urban project that is California and raised serious questions about both resilience and citizenship in the 21st century.The text is constructed in a way that the form itself works to develop a more holistic and grounded way of approaching the regional nature of urban development and the complex politics of regional governance. It begins with a historiography of the Bay Area, one that challenges conceptions of sprawl and fragmentation. It then examines the demographic restructuring of the region through a combination of census data analysis using GIS and ethnographic interviews, arguing that the changes in the region both blurred the lines of traditional American racial segregation which simultaneously producing a more "mobile" form of segregation on a megaregional scale. From this historical and geographic foundation, the argument is built to mimic, in a sense, the scales of the crisis itself. Chapter Three begins a more intense focus on planning institutions, the politics of development and shifting urban economics to show the interaction between decisions and events in eastern Contra Costa County, a portion of the region that saw dramatic growth and a stunning collapse over the past thirty years. This chapter focuses intently on planning, both on the plans that were approved and implemented and ones that died before either approval or implementation, with an eye for the vastly different playing field that these communities faced compared with ones which developed during earlier eras. This focus remains in Chapter Four, which examines the often ignored scale of the county to better understand the production of "edge cities" in Contra Costa County, developments which both restructured the region's labor markets and helped contribute to the growing stagnation of the politics of development. Chapter Five returns to the regional scale, focusing on race and the collective failure of both regional and local institutions to adequately solve the problems of inner core poverty inherited from the postwar era, problems which provided the demographic push for much of eastern Contra Costa County's demographic growth. Chapter Six focuses on the megaregional scale beyond the formal confines of the Bay Area, a challenging level of analysis because of its physical and human scale and lack of political and planning institutions, but made necessary by the fact that this is where the growth - and the foreclosures - are most notable. Finally, the conclusion examines the politics of race and development in the state of California, an analysis which illustrates and critiques the narrowed possibilities inherent to planning during this era. This scalar approach illustrates the broad collective responsibility for the production of crisis, where public and private, local and nonlocal, individual and collective actors all played a role in bringing the Bay Area to this point. It also points to three linked conclusions critical to the future of planning: the need to rethink the state-centered conception of planning, which has never held in the United States; the need to accept and work within the historically fragmented and multi-polar system of cities which has defined places like the San Francisco Bay Area since their founding; and the need to push for a broader and deeper conception of institutional responsibility, where institutions involved in the intentional production of space at all scales and in all sectors - i.e. planners - take responsibility for the "common purpose" that is urbanization and development