Globalization and Urbanization by Spencer James H.;

Author:Spencer, James H.; [Spencer, James H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The Indigenous City? Reconciling an Old-Timers’ Honolulu with a Global Society

Unlike most in the United States, the Aloha State of pristine beaches and lush mountains is a state that is mostly a big city. What makes Honolulu so remarkable is that there is such a cosmopolitan place in a pristinely natural environment rather than vice versa; with beautiful and lush beaches and mountains endemic to the isolated Pacific islands, it is the city, rather than the lush green and brown natural beauty of Honolulu that catches the eye after a five-hour flight traversing the blue Pacific waters. Honolulu is the tenth-largest municipality in one of the world’s most urbanized countries, in fact, and as goes the city, so goes the state.

Drive around the island of O‘ahu long enough and you will soon realize that the city and county of Honolulu—which is coterminous with the island—is a city of pack rats. For better or worse, its residents are accumulating and storing both material goods and garbage, as well as experiences, ideas, and aspirations, faster than the pristine and isolated island can cope with them.

Touring even the toniest neighborhoods in Honolulu, one can spy moldy and flaccid cardboard boxes filled with books, Pokemon dolls, and children’s sports trophies stacked high in open garages, pushed up next to washers and dryers. Oftentimes, the same garage is home to a rusting 1980s-era Ford pickup used to cart these boxes around from storage to yard sale and back again. Mirroring a broader dissonance between appearance and reality, these impromptu storage spaces often front the streets in million-dollar-home neighborhoods and house some of the most influential residents of the state.

Unlike Addis Ababa, these neighborhoods are no social flotsam; these people just value old things. They have consistently elected the United States’ most senior Senate delegation, for example—Senators Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka1—with a combined age of over 170 years between the two of them. The housing stock they live in dates—in large part—to a plantation era mostly characterized by an early-to-mid-twentieth-century style of single-wall-construction housing popular when the islands first became the Territory of Hawai‘i under U.S. control (1900); this small island outpost of the United States would not see statehood for fifty-nine years. According to the 2010 U.S. Census of Population and Housing,2 14.5 percent of the state’s residents were over the age of sixty-five, compared to the national average of 13 percent. This figure was mirrored for the city of Honolulu at 14.5 percent. While not remarkable at first glance, the sixty-five-and-up group grew by almost 18 percent over 2000 levels, while the eighteen-to-sixty-four group grew by only 10 percent over an admittedly larger baseline from 2000, but most important, the under-eighteen group actually decreased by 2 percent. To say that the state and its capital city, Honolulu, are places that hang on to the past—potentially at the expense of their future—is an understatement. The more relevant question is how this characteristic shapes the contemporary city’s identity.

Honolulu is an aging city

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