The winds are shifting for cities. Are you paying attention?
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For a city to be “antifragile,” to bounce back from disaster and disruption stronger than it was before, it needs to embrace the lessons of healthy ecological systems.
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A visit to a home restaurant in Rovinj, Croatia, shows the kind of small businesses and good urbanism that we could have in the U.S. if we just relaxed our zoning codes.
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From its one-time status as one of America’s most prosperous cities, Hartford, CT, is now one of the poorest—no thanks to its mid-twentieth-century urban renewal projects.
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In the postwar era, North American cities bulldozed whole blocks and neighborhoods for freeways, parking, and urban renewal. Old fire insurance maps can help us piece together what happened.
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Many Rhode Island cities have “good bones” — the infrastructure, walkable neighborhoods, and sturdy buildings that could build resilience and prosperity. So why are so many cities in The Ocean State squandering that inheritance now?
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For example: Is it right to use Robert Moses means to undo the very harms created by Robert Moses?
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The federal government wants to help convert repurpose empty commercial space into apartments. Is this a plan that helps solves two problems at once — the affordable housing crisis, and repurposing the malls that now stand empty in our cities — or a bad idea?
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We chose Memphis to kick off the Strong America Tour for a reason: the city is both an object lesson in what has gone wrong in American cities, and what could go right. And Memphis’s example helps us see why in places that are going to experience a renaissance, it’s going to come from the grassroots.
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Most Americans have never lived in a time when “the inner city” wasn’t a locus of poverty, physical blight and social disintegration. Yet many of us fail to grasp the extent to which public policy had its thumb on the scale from the start in creating those conditions.
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A Youtuber who goes by donoteat01 brilliantly uses the Cities:Skylines video game as a storytelling tool—in this case, to help us understand the ugly human consequences of the postwar urban freeway-building era.
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For decades, many city leaders have thought the only way to end blight was to tear down the eyesores and start fresh. Mobile, Alabama had another idea.
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New York state transportation authorities have the opportunity to correct a historic mistake in Syracuse, by removing an obsolete freeway that tore the city in half decades ago. Will they do the right thing?
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Richmond, Virginia’s proposed Navy Hill redevelopment would reinvent 10 blocks of the city’s core out of whole cloth, aiming for greatness in one fell swoop. The top-down, master-plan approach to city building is seductive. But it is also fragile.
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70 years ago, these two historic cities were on a similar path. Then one fell into debt while the other was swimming in money. You might be surprised by what they each look like today.
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The scale and value of what we’ve sacrificed in order to build parking lots and highways is staggering. Only by understanding that loss can we figure out how to build stronger towns.
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Attention freeway builders! Want to make up for dividing the community and destroying neighborhoods? How about replacing the homes you demolished?
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Government and corporate decisions half a century ago robbed our cities of life and prosperity today.
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Plus some musings on the nature of our present-day cities, and what they once were.
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From the towering Xerox Square, to the grand Civic Center, to the glistening Riverside Convention Center, virtually every corner of downtown Rochester has been “revitalized”, so why does it still feel so dead?
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