Thomas Wright / May 06 2011
For Release Friday, May 6, 2011
Citiwire.net
Let’s take a trip back to 1985, perhaps the peak of anti-urbanism in this nation’s history. Suburbanization was in full force across the landscape. As Dolores Hayden has noted, “by 1980 one out of seven American workers earned a living building, selling, repairing, insuring, driving or servicing vehicles and highways.” Meanwhile, our cities were dealing with the painful legacy of failed urban renewal projects, trying to figure out what to do with acres and acres of bulldozed sites. The Reagan Administration was cutting funding from Community Development Block Grants, mass transit, and other urban programs. And Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston, South Carolina wrote a letter to Jaquelin Robertson, Dean of the University of Virginia School of Architecture, to propose that they collaborate on a forum to educate mayors about architecture, design, and planning.
Mayor Riley predicted a great revival of American cities, but asked “What kind of cities are being rebuilt?” He proposed that by creating “a program aimed at increasing the mayors sophistication and interest in urban design, we could have a substantial impact on the quality and development of American cities.”
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Thomas Wright / Oct 01 2010
For Release Sunday, October 3, 2010
Co-Authored by Juliette Michaelson
Citiwire.net
As we have witnessed from recent debates in our nation’s capital, high speed rail and multi-year surface transportation programs are hard to plan, finance and build. They require long-term commitments from federal, state and local partners, and moreover, they oblige elected leaders to look beyond short-term political calculations.
Even the best projects can fall victim to these threats — witness recent developments in the New York/New Jersey region. A budget-cutting, shake-up-the-establishment politician, New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie, has discovered that he has no money for filling potholes, and suddenly a crucial strategic investment for the state’s long term economic growth seems less important than a promise not to raise gas taxes.
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Thomas K. Wright / Apr 22 2010
For Release Sunday, April 25, 2010
Citiwire.net
How does a metropolitan region project – and then plan – for its future? How was it done in the 20th century? And what’s new for the 21st?
I have a simple answer. For 20th, the word was infrastructure. For the 21st, it needs to be innovation.
That’s why the Regional Plan Association, where I work, decided to focus its 20th Annual Regional Assembly this month on new technologies that are radically more efficient, and promise significant cost-savings for cash-starved regional systems.
Our historic concentration, including three landmark regional plans – in 1929, 1969 and 1996 – focused on hard infrastructure such as transit lines, electricity, water supply, and especially early in the century, on accommodating automobiles. (Our 1929 document, for example, proposed 2,500 miles of limited access highways and included a plan for Radburn, N.J., entitled “New Town for the Motor Age.”) Later we took a different tack, urging as early as 1969 reserving several Manhattan streets for pedestrians and transit, and in 1996 a four-borough Second Avenue Subway.
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