Yule Heibel's Library tagged urban_renewal →  View Popular, Search in Google

Just learned about this site the other day. Given women's historical role in civic leadership (at the municipal level, via committees and clubs), and how that role was been maligned as small and "boob-ish" when metropolitanism grew in strength and favor, initiatives like "Shetroit"'s are important in getting women back in the game. This is especially the case now that new urbanism (also male-dominated) is trumpeting certain traditional values, which women pioneered and should own.
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Shetroit’s mission is to help create an enriching space in which the women of Detroit can weave community. Shetroit’s vision is that by bringing women together to support each other in realizing their self-worth and recognizing their strengths, new heights of feminine leadership can emerge.

As Shetroit grows, the site intends to encourage “using the Internet to get off the Internet” by nurturing connections that help build and encourage all facets of our individual life journeys that focus on self-esteem and the power of learning to love ourselves.
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women urbanism urban_renewal detroit shetroit cities city_smarts

Interesting - inner city renewal, courtesy of big tech companies?
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Google’s decision to locate its Pittsburgh operations in the inner city is but one way America’s ever-expanding knowledge economy is changing the real estate sector, something it is expected to continue doing. Not only are high-tech companies looking for unusual spaces that are reflective of their corporate culture, but firms in the knowledge sector are also reviving inner-city neighborhoods, spearheading the drive for sustainability, and even changing the way some new buildings are designed.
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pittsburgh google urban_renewal atlantic_cities

Not as powerful, perhaps, as photos of Detroit's ruins, these aerial shots of nature overtaking formerly built-up urban areas is startling in its own way:
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As with many industrial cities in America at the time, post-war St. Louis experienced a rapid decline of its inner city. Desperately seeking solutions before the decay could absorb downtown, local planners and politicians saw slum clearance as the best option.

Decades later, the results are nothing to celebrate. An aggressive demolition policy failed to create a better neighborhood. Instead, it led to a different kind of stigmatized inner city. The chaotic, dirty and declining urban condition of the mid-20th century gave way to the urban prairie of the 21st.
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atlantic_cities st_louis slums urban_renewal urban_forest

Fascinating look at tactical urbanism.
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City-making may have happened all at once at the desks of master planners like Daniel Burnham or Robert Moses, but that’s really not the way things happen today. No single master plan can anticipate the evolving and varied needs of an increasingly diverse population or achieve the resiliency, responsiveness and flexibility that shorter-term, experimental endeavors can. Which is not to say long-term planning doesn’t have its place. The two work well hand in hand. Mike Lydon, founding principal of The Street Plans Collaborative, argues for injecting spontaneity into urban development, and sees these temporary interventions (what he calls “tactical urbanism”) as short-term actions to effect long-term change.
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“We’re seeing a lot of these things emerge for three reasons,” Lydon continues. “One, the economy. People have to be more creative about getting things done. Two, the Internet. Even four or five years ago we couldn’t share tactics and techniques via YouTube or Facebook. Something can happen randomly in Dallas and now we can hear about it right away. This is feeding into this idea of growth, of bi-coastal competition between New York and San Francisco, say, about who does the cooler, better things. And three, demographic shifts. Urban neighborhoods are gentrifying, changing. They’re bringing in people looking to improve neighborhoods themselves. People are smart and engaged and working a 40-hour week. But they have enough spare time to get involved and this seems like a natural step.”
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nyt allison_arieff architecture tactical_urbanism urban_design urbanplanning urban_renewal pop_up

Fantastic article by Kay Hymowitz on Brooklyn, NY: history, economics, gentrification, and the importance of land use zoning. Must-read.
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Walentas’s prescience—and patience—put him in an unusual position. Like many successful developers, he was able to make a lot of money: space in the buildings he bought for $6 per square foot now sometimes sells for $1,000 per square foot. But unlike other developers, Walentas owned so much of a neighborhood that he could play God. Also, since he was making so much money from the properties overall, he could give rent breaks to commercial tenants that he viewed as desirable—for instance, upscale retailers like West Elm, the modern-furniture outlet, and Jacques Torres, a high-end chocolatier—while refusing chains like Duane Reade, which, he felt, set the wrong, down-market tone.
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city_journal kay_hymowitz brooklyn nyc urbanism urban_renewal entrepeneurialism

Heartbreaking. Talk about trashing a city - bombs couldn't be more thorough.
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This section of downtown is dominated by elevated roadways and surface lots but was once a vibrant cluster of rail and canal-based transit.
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atlantic_cities buffalo_ny urban_renewal surface_parking_lots

Fantastic. Putting imagination back into infrastructure. (How much we could have needed that in Victoria BC, both with regard to the Johnson Street Bridge and with the View + Vancouver streets intersection...
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“The strategy is how to integrate the entire community so that in the end they feel that it is theirs, that they own it. The city and the developers start to fall away in the background. If that happens then you’ll probably have a successful project.”

Aquino says that these strategies haven’t really been figured out yet. Public-private partnerships seem to be important for maintaining new parks, but initial funding can be hard to come by. When infrastructure projects are necessary, Aquino says the money will come through. Making that money work harder to create more than a new alleyway or drainage canal is a strategy more cities are likely to take.
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landscape_architecture landscape_infrastructure infrastructure cities urban_renewal urban_parks

Amen.
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We now know what they didn't in Eisenhower's day: it's possible to remove highways from city centers without ruining either the city or the highway. In fact, both can emerge stronger than before, as they did when Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco was replaced with an inviting waterfront boulevard. Many other cities now hope to duplicate that success. Earlier this fall the Urban Land Institute released a list of ten urban highways whose days are numbered. Many of these usual suspects have appeared on similar lists released by the Congress for the New Urbanism over the past few years. Moving east to west across the country, here's a look at ten roads that may not be cutting through cities much longer, as well as some of the plans that might replace them.
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I don't know about this. Seems too one-sided...
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“Parks,” she says, “can solve the urban real estate crisis.”
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atlantic_cities urban_renewal parks

I like the retail-on-ground-floor/apartments-above model. Standardize away. Most towns and cities could use more of it.
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Leinberger, an urban land-use strategist and professor at the University of Michigan, includes the Grocery Anchored Neighborhood Center on his list of the 19 standard real estate product types dominant in post-war America. Also on the list: suburban detached starter homes, big-box anchored power centers, multi-tenant bulk warehousing and self-storage facilities. All of these products are designed for drivable suburban communities. (...)
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But we overbuilt these 19 models, he says.

“We built the wrong product in the wrong location, and nobody wants it any more,” he says. “That’s the reason for the housing crisis, and therefore the mortgage crisis, and therefore the Great Recession.”

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...Leinberger estimates that a good 90 percent of new development in the [DC] area has lately been planned for walkable, high-density living... These are the real estate products Leinberger believes we’ll need going forward: ground-floor retail with rental apartments on top, hotel/convention centers with condos above and a subway corridor below. These models may very well become standardized, too.
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urban_renewal suburban_style suburbia christopher_leinberger atlantic_cities real_estate malls

This is very heartening:
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...Ziegler’s approach was about adding the positive to diminish the negative, not erasing the negative and expecting a positive to emerge.

In the end, the PHLF approach has been enormously successful. A variety of strategies, as opposed to a master plan, were established that could be applied according to different local conditions. Residents were involved in the process from the beginning. The worst vacant properties were purchased from absentee landlords and restored.
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urbanism urban_renewal heritage pittsburgh historic_preservation

Short blog post with wonderful video embedded featuring Amanda Burden (NYC planner) who talks about Yolanda Garcia. QUOTE
Via Verde aside, nearly a dozen public housing complexes have been built in Melrose during the last decade, as part of the mayor’s $3 billion initiative to add some 165,000 new subsidized apartments around the city. It seemed like a good idea to make the video to give Times readers a look at a few of the buildings and some sense of the scope of the change that has come to the South Bronx.
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nyc bronx amanda_ burden yolanda_garcia urbanplanning urban_renewal

Some terrific ideas here:
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This summer the Institute for Urban Design asked New Yorkers to submit ideas for making the city's public spaces "smarter, more beautiful and livable." Some 500 responses later, the institute then asked designers from around the world to shape these raw ideas into concrete projects for the city. The results of this "collaborative re-imagining" of New York were revealed during Urban Design Week, which came to a close on Tuesday, with 10 entries declared collective "winners."
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urban_renewal urban_amenities urban_design cities nyc atlantic_cities design

Totally agree/ am intrigued by the last sentence in this paragraph (starts with "In effect..."):
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We made the city work for people for whom it had not worked in a long time. People without capital for whom low barriers to entry and not certainty of outcome were the defining issues. Those who were operating digital cottage industries and Etsy stores, artists and fashion designers, bedroom record labels and Flickr photographers. In effect we made the physical space behave as their virtual spaces did -- easy to get into and out of, allowing of experimentation and failure and most importantly full of tools and structures and plugins designed to make it simple and cheap for them to do what they are passionate about.
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Listen to the video. Couldn't we do something like this in Victoria?

cities grist hacking urbanism renew_newcastle urban_renewal

Wish I could attend this event:
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Old is the New Green:
Starbucks Center
Presented in Partnership with the Cascadia Region Green Building Council Seattle Branch.

This iconic building was built in 1912 by Union Pacific from Yesler Mill timber to house the Sears and Roebuck & Co. store. At 2.1 million square feet the LEED-EB certified building is the largest multi-tenant building in Washington State and helped to breathe life back into Seattle's SODO neighborhood.

Kevin Daniels, President of Nitze-Stagen and Daniels Development, will speak to the challenges of being a trail blazer in sustainable preservation and what made this project such a success. Don't miss the chance to get an insider view at what makes Starbucks' global headquarters a leader in green preservation.
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heritage sustainability preservation urban_renewal adaptability seattle architecture

Worth keeping an eye on:
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...what makes the Living City Block in Denver, Colorado such an important project, defining the ideal ‘cell structure’ for a healthy city in the 21st century. It’s mission? “To create a replicable, scalable and economically viable framework for the resource efficient regeneration of existing cities.“

Scheduled to launch in Summer 2010, two adjacent city blocks (one street block) in LoDo (Lower Downtown) Denver will become a live demonstration and model for environmentally-conscious business and economic development, and livability.
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denver living_cities city_block urban_renewal green_strategies

St. Louis urban blogger Steve Patterson had a massive stroke 2 years ago. In this post, he makes a compelling analogy between strokes and recovery from them to what has happened to cities and how they should structure their recovery.

I thought this section was excellent - cities are like bodies:
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"Cities need to start with the basics, one step at a time. Cities need to examine what no longer works and what can come back first. In stroke therapy they leg returns before the arm. Fingers come back very late. I can barely move my left ankle and I still can’t move my toes on my left foot. Cities, I think, have been trying to move their big toe rather than get their leg back first.

The therapy I would suggest for cities is to focus on minimal basics needed to function, focus on what makes a city a city. Walkable. Parking is on the street or behind buildings. Density higher than the edge."
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This also suggests that micromanaging the details is exactly the wrong way to go.

st_louis steve_patterson urban_renewal analogy cities

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Andy Lipkis, Founder and President of TreePeople, describes how this organization has pioneered an integrated approach to managing urban ecosystems as watersheds in the Los Angeles region. This involves strategic tree planting, tree-mimicking technologies, and community engagement to generate multiple solutions to the environmental threats facing our cities, including ensuring a sustainable water supply, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, preventing water and air pollution, fostering stronger neighborhoods, and creating jobs. For a summary of TreePeople's six demonstration projects that are now collecting 1.25 million gallons of water every time it rains 1" in Los Angeles, visit www. treepeople.org. Video Going to Green: Planting Seeds of Change with Community Forestry produced by the Media & Policy Center Foundation for PBS.
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Great stuff here - fascinating to see how "silo-think" works against solving problems.

environment ecological_urbanism los_angeles envirospeak.tv green_technologies urban_renewal

Interesting article (which incidentally puts Vancouver front & centre), blogged by Richard Florida at Creative Class: the subtitle is "the demographic inversion of the American city." It's about how the "inner city" and its "inner city suburbs" are now desirable (and expensive) places to live, creating a 24/7 downtown (desired & theorized early on by Jane Jacobs, eg.), while the less affluent (ok, the poor!) are forced to live on the outskirts (suburbs). This used to be called "gentrification," but Ehrenhalt points out that it's a much more complex process than just that.

Haven't read all the comments to this article, but it starts with some excellent ones -- intelligent observations by readers.

cities downtown creative_cities suburbs gentrification trends urbanization urban_renewal demographics

- fascinating question & response (Qs by Ma Qingyun) re. cities and what they mean today. "Head Curator of the biennale Ma Qingyun (who’s also Dean of the USC school of Architecture and planning consultant to the Beijing Olympics) asked all participants and exhibitors to answer 10 questions on the theme of urban expiration and regeneration. The results were published in a 32 page newspaper distributed to all visitors. I can’t find this gem of aggregated thoughts on the future of our cities, but here are our answers posted on the blog documenting our design creations and research www.regional-office.com."

cities joshua_kauffman ma_qingyun urban_renewal urbanism