Mary Newsom / Feb 28 2010
For Release Sunday, February 28, 2010
Citiwire.net
A little more than a dozen years ago, a collection of three adjacent suburban towns in the sprawling Sun Belt region of Charlotte did something extraordinary. After months of public workshops, lectures and community discussions, months of looking at slide shows to choose what kinds of streets, stores, houses and apartments they wanted for their towns, they revamped their town codes. They aimed to discourage conventional suburbia and encourage traditional neighborhood development, transit-oriented projects and farmland preservation.
It warmed the hearts of planners. It drew national attention and awards and, after a couple of New Urbanist neighborhoods were built, busloads of visiting Smart Growth disciples. Writers, including yours truly, ladled on praise. In 1996 I wrote an editorial calling the new ordinances in Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson, N.C., “a remarkable exercise in local and regional planning” and “a remarkable vision.” Read More »
Mary Newsom / Sep 24 2009
For Release Thursday, September 24, 2009
Citiwire.net
The TV bar, “Cheers,” was a perfect, though fictional, example of one. The Paris café Les Deux Magots was a real one, and it famously drew artists and intellectuals such as Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. If you’re lucky, you live near one, too: a coffeehouse, pub, barber shop or general store where you can visit anytime and linger. You’ll see people you know and people you don’t, and no one makes you leave ’til you’re ready.
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg dubbed them Third Places in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place. He wrote that Third Places (not work, not home) are “the heart of a community’s social vitality, the grassroots of democracy.” But in the U.S., he wrote, we’ve almost lost them, as people spend more time in cars, in shopping malls, or at home in front of a screen.
Earlier this month I spent a couple of days in Toronto at a conference for the Information Architecture Institute, which drew hundreds of bright and creative people interested in the human mind, IT and how they intersect. One social media expert spoke about Oldenburg, and proposed that online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are America’s new Third Places.
Well, no. Read More »
Mary Newsom / Jun 25 2009
For Release Thursday, June 25, 2009
Citiwire.net
Maybe somewhere in Obama-land, stimulus money is protecting public school classrooms. But here in the red clay of North Carolina, there’s a teacher layoff bloodbath going on.
A few days after I heard that the toughest and best history teacher at our daughter’s high school got the ax–one of hundreds of teacher layoffs in Charlotte’s public schools and thousands in $5 billion-in-the-red North Carolina–I listened to Charlotte’s airport manager describe a $300-million parking deck he’s planning, complete with pedestrian tunnel. It’s in a package of projects: a new international concourse, two new hourly parking decks, an expanded ticketing area, a new runway–all to be funded by bond sales, the debt paid with airport revenues. “We’re spending money like drunken sailors,” the manager recently told a Charlotte Chamber of Commerce group.
This is madness. Read More »
Mary Newsom / Feb 26 2009
For Release Sunday, March 1, 2009
Citiwire.net
Across the U.S., civil engineers are practically giddy–well, they’re as giddy as civil engineers are ever going to be.
“For the first time in my career,” says Wayne Klotz, a Texan who is president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, “infrastructure is a hot topic.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, president of the National Governors’ Association, has for a year been trying to spotlight the nation’s serious infrastructure needs–although (don’t tell Klotz) Rendell himself concedes the topic lacks a certain sexiness.
But these days, recession-pummeled Americans are following the federal stimulus package almost as avidly as, in happier times, they obsessed over Anna Nicole Smith or Laci Peterson. They’re arguing whether stimulus money should go to the arts, or to repair and expand infrastructure, such as fixing bridges, boosting transit or finishing urban loop roads.
It’s about time people noticed those public works projects. Read More »