Recently in Cities Category
Hit & Run > Best Sports Stadium Name Ever? - Reason Magazine
The only two Republicans on the New York City Council want to rename the Mets' new stadium Citi/Taxpayer Field. Citigroup has a 20-year, $400 million naming rights agreement, but Citi's federal bailout amounts to multiple billions of dollars. (Via Club for Growth.)
Urban Review STL: Euclidean Zoning To The Extreme
Good discussion of the evolution of use-based zoning, from Euclid v. Ambler to the present, and why St. Louis needs a new land use code to go along with its new comprehensive plan.
50 Strange Buildings of the World | Village of Joy
Strange for many different reasons: Indigenous architecture, starchitecture, whimsical structures. (Via Samizdata.)
Urban Review STL: Selling a Native American Mound
"For Sale: Cozy home with two bedrooms, two baths, one fireplace and a 2-car garage. Oh yeah, it sits on the very last Native American mound in a city once known as 'Mound City.' It even has a name, Sugar Loaf Mound." More details here.
Some good news, mixed news, and bad news for downtown Oklahoma City. One of the bad news items: "The Thunder is losing. That was expected, just as it was with the Hornets. But the buzz just isn't the same this time around. And some of the good things going on right now are tied to the arrival of the NBA. A souring on the team could be bad for much of downtown."
Longtime Bricktown advocate Jim Brewer dies | NewsOK.com
Note: Bricktown was in existence long before MAPS happened. "Brewer was a successful oilman when he began buying properties in Bricktown in the mid-1980s...."
imagiNATIVEamerica » Oklahoma City's 1910 Plan for Grand Boulevard by W.H. Dunn
Oooooo! Aaaaaaah! Beautiful maps, plans, and renderings of an early day plan for Oklahoma City's parks and boulevards.
imagiNATIVEamerica » The Boston Public Library Courtyard
Blair Humphreys captures sunlight, shadow, and classic architecture in the courtyard of the Boston Public Library on a sunny late summer day. (This is his homework (the lucky dog) for the MIT course 11.309J: Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry: "This course explores photography as a disciplined way of seeing and of investigating urban landscapes and expressing ideas.")
St. Paul Downtown Conversations
A summary, from earlier this year, of what St. Paul, Minn., businesspeople like and dislike about their downtown.
The New Republic: Trading Places
"In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be 'demographic inversion.' Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so....
"[T]he deindustrialization of the central city, for all the tragic human dislocations it caused, has eliminated many of the things that made affluent people want to move away from it. Nothing much is manufactured downtown anymore (or anywhere near it), and that means that the noise and grime that prevailed for most of the twentieth century have gone away....
"This is the generation that grew up watching 'Seinfeld,' 'Friends,' and 'Sex and the City,' mostly from the comfort of suburban sofas. We have gone from a sitcom world defined by 'Leave It to Beaver' and 'Father Knows Best' to one that offers a whole range of urban experiences and enticements."
