I’m working through some podcsts from last month’s Aspen Ideas Festival.
My first pick is Richard Florida on “The Great Reset”.
We have inherited an economy – and a set of institutions, management principles, a way of life – which at every level reflects the old industrial order, which has been collapsing before our very eyes. . . .
I’m not totally convinced of Florida’s theses about the creative class, etc. but he has some thought-provoking statistics and conclusions about the nature of economic development, job creation, urban planning, community strengths, what drives the economy, and how to move forward.
Click here to listen. If you bog down, don’t miss the Q&A at the end (beginning around the 42 minute mark ).
Continuing my weekly roundups, here’s the best of what I found/read last week:
The Planning Commissioners Journal continued its Planning ABCs series with “R is for Regional”, which had some interesting highlights of prescient planning in America over the past few centuries. I particularly enjoyed reading about Ogilthorpe’s plan for Savannah, which
set a framework for growth by providing for development by planned neighborhood units, focused on public squares, and edged by through streets. A key feature of the plan was the provision of public land reserves for future neighborhood additions.
The plan also provided for Savannah’s urban center to be bounded by small allotment gardens for growing food for family consumption. These gardens were, in turn, rimmed by a network of larger farm plots. Each grouping of ten farms shared a wood lot, providing fuel and game. Oglethorpe’s recognition of the connection between agricultural production and urban vitality remains instructive for planners today.
Since planners sometimes
don’t get it right, in contrast to the examples above, the Sustainable Cities Collective post
Ecological Urbanism: Redesigning the City urges us to
learn from past mistakes:
Related to that is another point of concern deriving from the narrow interpretation of sustainability. Quite frequently, particularly during the last couple of years, sustainability is equated with minimising energy and resource use. I am afraid that applied to the urban realm, the dictate of resource efficiency can produce similar outcomes to those generated by the push for greater functionality which dominated modernist city planning during the previous century. Following such rationale, for instance, one can easily make the argument for the wholesale replacement of the energy inefficient historic housing stock of many cities around the world.
There were good ideas and examples of real-life applications in Mashable’s
How Social Media is changing government agencies. “While many government agencies still tend to employ the “broadcast” model when using social media, some are engaging…”
At the local law enforcement level, Web 2.0 technology has been implemented in some departments to give people details about what officers have been up to. At the Bellevue Police Department in Nebraska, Twitter is used to solicit help from the public and Facebook is used as a comment and complaint board for residents. In Great Britain, the Merseyside Police website personalizes information according to neighborhood, also appealing to the public for help as needed.
Finally, a thought-provoking
article in The Atlantic tells about a program to address “food deserts”, urban areas in which there is literally no access to fresh food and people are confined to a diet of Cheetos and Big Gulp soft drinks. We’re very fortunate in our choices here, but many poorer areas have been denied that.
When I first began working. . . we had to spend a lot of time showing people maps, showing them the evidence. Of course, when we spoke to the folks who actually lived in those neighborhoods, they were acutely aware that there was no fresh food available. . . The areas where there was no access to fresh food also had the highest rates of diet-related deaths. After we launched our first report, showing a connection between health and food access, people started to pay attention here. City council members and state representatives were surprised. They hadn’t seen anything like that. So we started to feel some movement and some mobilization.
More next week. This is fun.
Here are my choices of the best of the best of my perusals last week. I don’t necessarily agree with everything here, but each post or article below did an excellent job of framing questions, brainstorming solutions, or just providing a different take from conventional wisdom.
Let’s kick off with this post by Strong Towns about the real costs of auto-centric planning. Wouldn’t it be great if Northfield adopted this version of a community branding or market positioning pitch?
Anywhere, USA, is yesterday’s town. Move to Someplace, USA, where we have abundant housing that is well priced along with neighborhood schools, parks, churches and shopping all within walking distance. Spend your money on a better way of life. Avoid the costly commute. You can even live with only one car. In Someplace, USA, we cater to the discriminating consumer – the one that understands living better should actually cost less.
Read the whole article for more.
Continuing along transportation lines (yes, pun intended),
End of the Road: A Short History of Our Obsession with Freeways focuses on the Pacific Northwest, but much of it is relevant to the rest of the country:
[L]eaders . . . have their work cut out for them. . . Closing the Sustainability Gap is going to require some serious changes in the thinking of a lot of people. . . Politicians and highway advocates need to read the memo—reducing driving means putting fewer cars on the road, which means we shouldn’t be investing scarce resources in more highways.
This
article in Atlantic Monthly implies that some of our real estate and economic woes are due in large part to stupid building and land use practices.
“… what we face today is not just a cyclical housing problem, but a structural one as well. Over the past decade, most house building occurred on the suburban fringe, in large part because that’s where houses could be built most easily and quickly. But now that the bubble has popped, we can clearly see that underlying demand in these areas is extremely weak, and oversupply is massive.
Urban-style housing in walkable neighborhoods—including those in the inner suburbs—is what’s in demand today. And for a variety of reasons, that demand will intensify in the coming years. Only by serving it can the country kick-start growth in an enormous and essential part of the economy.
Finally, I’ll conclude with urban analyst Aaron Renn (a/k/a
The Urbanophile) and his review of
Richard Florida‘s latest book,
“The Great Reset”.
Florida’s recipe for cities is to favor grass roots change over big, top down redevelopment initiatives like stadiums, and investing in quality of life and place making. But he, like Glaeser, says that the primary focus of investments ought to be people, not places. This isn’t a matter of writing off cities or not writing off cities, but rather a political or philosophical question about where the focus of our investments ought to be.
It’s a great review of the book, as well as a balanced critique of Florida’s whole Creative Class thing.
Happy reading! And of course I’d welcome your thoughts and comments on any of the above.
