Indy Does it Again

Sports teams are like crack-cocaine to city administrators. They seem to see them as the quick fix to harsh economic realities, building new stadiums to attract or retain teams as economic investments. Rarely does the investment change the harsh reality, but it does put a buzz in the air. Still, taxpayers are typically left paying [...]

Street Vending as a Socially Sustainable Practice

Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier is an ethnographic study of streetvendors in New Yorks City’s Greenwich Village. The observations and contextual descriptions are fascinating. This book is a must read for anyone directly or indirectly concerned with the public spaces and the quality of urban life.
Off and on over the course of four years Duneier worked [...]

Demolition Party!!!

Does anyone else find this strange? I don’t know the specifics of the buildings but while they don’t seem especially significant they do seem to contribute to the district.
I guess the CIC didn’t care. Somehow they turned something that could have been controversial into a party. Everyone love a party right?

And they didn’t even demolish [...]

Newsmakers Segment

Saw this interesting segment on Newsmakers a few weeks ago and remembered to post it today. It is an interview with Jayne Merkel, a architectural historian and writer.
I especially like the comments about the power of planning as it relates to Cincinnati.

Part 2: Is New Urbanism a New Civitas

Cities all over are on the rebound. But this isn’t you parent’s urbanism; it’s a New Urbanism. These two words are often equated with mixed use, public transit, walkability, and my personal favorite ambiguous term, livability. New urbanism may encompass these some of these ideas, but it also represents a new ideology in planning that [...]

Is New Urbanism a New Civitas?

Civitas, a roman term, described the status of citizenship in the Roman empire as well as a type of semi-autonomous settlement made up of cives. Doug Kelbaugh, in comparing different paradigms of urbanism (New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism & Post Urbanism), focuses on this term in an article that relates the differnt types of urbanism to [...]

You can deny it if you want

but that is the first sign of a problem.
I think that the justifications for revitalization are often placed on saving buildings and ignoring what happens to people, or at least not thinking about how it impacts different people differently. This article about does a good job at exposing the psychological impacts and not just the [...]

Double Down on Indy

Yesterday I posted about Indy’s Cultural Trail and almost wrote a thought that I have been saying for a while. That is that in the next five years Indy will be the Portland of the midwest. But I am not particularly fond of such comparisons. Today I came across this article about Indy becoming the [...]

Indy’s Cultural Trail

Yesterday Indianapolis celebrated the completion of the first phase of the Cultural Trail. There is more to be done, but the completion of this stage is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, there is no other project like it, probably anywhere but certainly not in the region of similar sized cities. Secondly, in the [...]

Learning from Bogotá

I came across this excellent series of videos about Bogotá’s mayor, Peñalosa. The series talks at length about the public spaces of the city and how the mayor has created an extensive system of pedestrian, bicycle and bus transit. The scale and political will is unmatched. Check it out.
UPDATE: And an interview in the NYTimes [...]