Eugenie Birch / Jul 23 2010
For Release Sunday, July 25, 2010
Citiwire.net
ISTANBUL — This fabled world city has a remarkable story to tell. Recently the European Union awarded it the highly competitive “European City of Culture 2010,” title, the first for a non-EU member. More important, Istanbul is becoming a viable model for the 21st century megacity — places of 10 million or more inhabitants, likely (cumulatively) by 2050 to house 20 percent of the world’s urban population.
With its 11 million people, Istanbul is the fifth most populous city in the world, following Shanghai, Mumbai, Karachi and Delhi. It’s emblematic of megacities, now largely concentrated in Asia. But it’s no newcomer: it’s been occupied for 8,000 continuous years. It sits in an earthquake zone, it has flood-prone geography and municipal boundaries that span Europe and Asia; the internationally-governed, heavily-trafficked Bosporus River divides its territory.
Huge (5,400 square kilometers) and dense (2,400 people per square kilometer) Istanbul for the last five years has absorbed about 250,000 rural migrants and new babies annually. A stream of fresh population has flowed continuously for the past 50 years at an annual growth rate of 4.5 percent. (For comparison, figures for the largest city in the continental US, Jacksonville, are 2,292 square kilometers [area] and 354 people/square kilometer [density] and 5% [annual growth rate]).
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Roberta Brandes Gratz / Jul 16 2010
For Release Sunday, July 18, 2010
Citiwire.net
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — “Rightsizing the city” has a different meaning here than in cities where the demolition of vacant homes is the primary but historically fruitless solution. In this upstate post-industrial city, an extraordinary coalition has come together around a multi-faceted policy of regeneration by adding the positive rather than straining to remove the negative.
No one seems left out of the loose partnership among the mayor, university chancellor, assorted neighborhood groups and business associations. The positive spirit is palpable just talking to local residents and activists and viewing reviving rundown areas spread around town.
“There is a ‘can do’ sense throughout the city,” says designer and preservation activist Beth Crawford, “a sense that neighborhoods can fight for what they need and want, oppose demolitions, achieve good planning and needed enforcement.”
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Mary Newsom / Jul 09 2010
For Release Sunday, July 11, 2010
Citiwire.net
As local politicians across the country get scorched by voter anger over recession-induced budget cuts — laying off teachers, closing schools and libraries and slashing services — perhaps they’ll be more receptive than usual to some powerful and surprising tax revenue numbers.
So what follows is about fiscal prudence as much as it is about smart city planning.
Conventional wisdom, of course, says that to prop up the property tax base, a high-end shopping mall is just the ticket. But when Sarasota County, Fla., looked at where the county government gets the biggest bang for its property tax buck, it found some numbers that may surprise a lot of people.
Sarasota County Director of Smart Growth Peter Katz, speaking to a meeting of Citistates Associates in Minnesota late last month, described a recent analysis of the county’s property tax revenue per acre. He pointed first to residential areas. Not surprisingly, when you work the numbers on a per-acre basis, residential property inside the county’s municipalities offered the biggest revenue per acre — a little more than $8,200 per acre for single family houses within the city of Sarasota. This makes sense, as in-town land values tend to be higher.
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Manuel Pastor / Jul 01 2010
For Release Sunday, July 4, 2010
Citiwire.net
America is changing: we have a black president, increasing diversity in the ranks of the nation’s CEOs, and a new generation seemingly at ease with racial and other differences. And a lot more change is in the works: by 2042, the county will be majority-minority, by 2023 the majority of those under the age of 18 will be youth of color, and this year or next will the first (but not the last) in which the majority of births in the U.S. will be to black, Latino and Asian parents.
It’s enough to make pundits wax about a new “post-racial” era in which race and ethnicity are less salient as social and political categories. But despite what is surely a startling shift in attitudes (Tea Party undertones notwithstanding), the income gap between African Americans and Latinos on the one hand and whites on the other has remained stable since the mid-1970s, even as the recent wave of foreclosures has shattered the wealth of those homeowners, disproportionately of color, who came late to the housing boom.
So why, then, the “post-racial” appeal? Part of it, of course, stems from the hope that some of America’s thorniest problems — the residues of slavery, Jim Crow, and racially restrictive immigration laws — will just go away. Part of it is that race is difficult to talk about: whites with the best intentions worry that they will say the wrong thing while people of color resent it when they are seen through the sole prism of their skin and not their full identities.
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Mary Newsom / Jun 26 2010
For Release Sunday, June 27, 2010
Citiwire.net
ATHENS — Each city is a unique blend of history, culture and architecture. But put three dozen urban planners and scholars from around the globe into one room and you discover that their concerns sound astoundingly similar.
In June I spent three days in Athens with a group of former International Urban Fellows from Johns Hopkins University, holding their annual conference this year in the Greek capital city of almost 4 million. I asked those in attendance — most from Britain and Europe, but others from Mexico, India and Turkey — to pinpoint the biggest problem their city faces.
Despite major differences in history, urban form, customs and governance between their cities and U.S. metros, their answers might easily have come from planners in Atlanta, Cleveland, Charlotte or Chicago.
In the U.S., with our primitive rapid transit, our expensive — and expansive — large-lot suburban neighborhoods and our rapacious appetite for oil-based energy, we’re apt to imagine that other countries’ cities have found more effective solutions to problems that bedevil our urban areas. Europe is like a gigantic, well-planned Portland (though with better French fries), we think, while the U.S. is more like sprawling Phoenix.
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Bill Dodge / Jun 19 2010
For Release Sunday, June 20, 2010
Citiwire.net
Local governments have strengthened their capacities multifold during my professional life. I recall vividly working with some that once keep financial records by hand, depended on snail mail for communications, and only responded to their neighbors under court order. Conversely, I have seen local governments earn the respect, and accompanying tax dollars, to provide state-of-the-art roads and sewers, public safety and recreation programs, and even bus service and affordable housing.
Yet in spite of this increased competency, individual local governments have been losing the ability to address many of their toughest challenges — the ones that cut across jurisdictional boundaries — at an increasing pace since the turn of the century. If there has ever been a time for innovation in local government, it is now.
Crosscutting challenges are not new. Some were predetermined by our natural environment. For example, local governments realized that taking drinking water out upstream and dumping waste water downstream only worked for the jurisdiction at the headwaters. Everyone else was going to drink someone else’s pollution. The same was discovered when the jurisdictions drawing on a common aquifer exceeded its ability to replenish itself and had to keep digging deeper wells. Neighboring local governments realized that they needed to negotiate watershed plans to assure adequate and potable drinking water. Ditto for airshed plans to breathe clean air.
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Peter Katz / Jun 11 2010
For Release Sunday, June 13, 2010
Citiwire.net
That’s what I would have said to Shaun Donovan, Secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development had I been able to reach the podium before he was whisked into a waiting car for a tour of Atlanta-area public housing sites. Donovan had just addressed the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU)’s annual gathering this May. CNU has been working tirelessly for the past two decades to find a new and better approach to community development in America.
Simply stated, CNU seeks to build strong, economically competitive regions woven from a fabric of walkable neighborhoods and districts, that offer beautiful, affordable places to live, work, learn and play. What CNU members dislike is the single-use development pattern known as suburban sprawl– the pattern prevalent in most places built over the past 50-60 years.
Apparently, Donovan dislikes sprawl too. He thanked CNU members for their part in changing “the way we think about our communities” and offered his critique of the suburban-edge housing boom that hindsight now tells us was a fool’s paradise:
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Mark Muro and Rob Puentes / Jun 05 2010
For Release Sunday, June 06, 2010
Citiwire.net
The federal transportation finance system is broken and will be short on cash for the for a long time.
Some regions—like the growing Phoenix, Salt Lake, Las Vegas, and Denver metropolitan areas—have meanwhile achieved transformation viability through unusual self-help (although they still face massive challenges).
Is there a deal to be done? Perhaps there is.
Check out, for example, the intriguing concept for a new federal-metro partnership in transportation finance being shopped around by the Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) in Arizona.
Challenged by needs yet pessimistic about the likelihood of new federal funding, MAG would have the federal government and large metropolitan areas work a trade in which Washington would provide new incentives in the form of increased and direct funding to metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and new flexibilities in exchange for those regions’ continued contribution of substantial regional funding to the creation of the national transportation system. Along those lines, what MAG calls a “new partnership” between Washington and its most creative regions might enable new progress in addressing the nation’s gargantuan transportation challenges.
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Neal Peirce / May 29 2010
For Release Sunday, April 18, 2010 (Reprinted May 30)
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
Supermarkets surrounded by acres of asphalt. Push-wagons heavily loaded with groceries wheeled out, the haul stashed in car trunks. Always a drive — often several miles — to get food.
We perfected the buy-and-drive model from the post-World War II expansion onward. But is it necessarily the future?
No, asserts my Seattle friend and urban design planner, Mark Hinshaw. He sees a dramatically transformed role for supermarkets. They’ll actually become the anchors of new and walkable neighborhoods, he predicts in a Planning magazine article co-authored with markets analyst Brian Vanneman.
Why the shift? Americans’ high personal consumption levels were starting to wind down even before the Great Recession. Households have shrunk in size and the population is aging, with more taste for close-by shops and facilities. Many young people are eschewing the scattered suburban pattern in favor of denser urban living. Buying a house on the urban fringe, once seen as a ticket to wealth-building, now looks to be a big risk. Walking for health and weight loss has begun, for many Americans, to outshine the sedentary lifestyle of using an auto for every conceivable errand. And many people are looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint.
But are those shifts big enough to let neighborhood-based supermarkets compete with and maybe outpace the drive-only suburban locations? You’ll wonder, as I did.
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Edward T. McMahon / May 21 2010
For Release Sunday, May 23, 2010
Citiwire.net
America has an infrastructure problem: crowded highways, leaking pipes, collapsing bridges, and aging transit systems. Lots of people have been talking about the infrastructure problem, although given the deep and ongoing state and federal budget crisis we haven’t really done much about it.
Sure the Obama administration recently directed $8.5 billion to high speed rail and billions more for “shovel ready” projects in the stimulus bill, but considering that the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates that the nation faces a $2.2 trillion infrastructure backlog, this is just a drop in the bucket.
Infrastructure will lay the foundation for America’s future prosperity but our elected leaders have failed to level with the American people about how the country is falling behind our global competitors or explaining the true costs of making required upgrades and building new systems.” Leveling with the American people” is just one of the key recommendations of Infrastructure 2010: Investment Imperative, the fourth in a series of annual reports produced by the Urban Land Institute and Ernst and Young on U.S. and global infrastructure trends.
Mass transit is just one area where the rhetoric doesn’t meet the reality. While the U.S. has provided “seed funding” for high speed rail in a few important travel corridors, China has leaped far ahead of the US and other countries, including Japan and France and is now the world leader in high speed rail. After years of investment in new highways, China is now investing billions in a cutting edge network of train and subways designed to boost exports and revolutionize the flow of people and goods. By 2012, China will have over 5,000 miles of high speed rail and is currently building 60 new subway lines in more than 20 cities. Next year when a new Shanghai to Beijing high speed line opens (a year ahead of schedule) the journey between China’s two most important cities will be reduced to just 4 hours for a 600 mile trip.
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