Urban Review STL: Lead with your strong side

Urban Review STL: Lead with your strong side

Steve Patterson applies lessons from stroke rehabilitation to city revitalization: "St Louis' strong side is great urban architecture on a nicely scaled grid of walkable streets. The suburbs don't have those strong areas. Yet here we tend to lead with our weak side -- suburban anti-city stuff. The more of this we have the less of the strong side we have.... Had St Louis built up its strong side rather than coming from a weak position we would have focused on traditional storefront shops along streets. Instead we went with the suburban mall model sans the acres of free parking and it flopped big time. St Louis, like me this morning, was trying the quick route. I recovered fairly quickly but a city's mistakes are harder to recover from."