Cities: August 2008 Archives
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."
Drawing a Blank Downtown - TIME
From 1983, but still relevant 25 years later: "Although the tide has turned and bankers and developers are again investing in downtown, the shiny new megastructures of the '70s and '80s are often still as destructive of its 'remarkable intricacy and liveliness' as the bulldozers of the '50s and '60s.... As Whyte's photos make clear, the worst offenders are convention centers, like the one in the Seattle Sheraton Hotel, and the new megastructure office, hotel and shopping centers, such as the Bonaventure Hotel and Atlantic Richfield Plaza in Los Angeles, the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco and Omni International in Atlanta. Architecturally, these structures often have an awesome and arrogant beauty. Socially, they set themselves deliberately and offensively apart from the city around them."
2blowhards.com: David Sucher, Day Two
Part two of the interview with the author of City Comforts: "We've associated high-density cities with public transportation -- trains, a subway. Somehow we think: oh, we've got trains, so now we'll have an interesting high-density neighborhood. No, wrong. That's not the way it happens. Density is a byproduct. For example: people flock to places that are interesting. You don't have to encourage them."
2blowhards.com: David Sucher, Day One
An interview with the author of City Comforts: "What's missing from the general discussion about buildings and cities and towns?" "At the moment there's just not enough at it. If people were doing more of it, they'd get more skilled. People don't notice. I have discussions with people, and they let their mental images of something triumph over what's actually there.... I guess one thing that's missing is people actually experiencing stuff. They have images in their minds, but I don't think they go out and get a lot of ground truth."
Childhood's End by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Summer 2008
"A system of perverse incentives in a culture of undiscriminating materialism, where the main freedom is freedom from legal, financial, ethical, or social consequences, makes childhood in Britain a torment both for many of those who live it and those who observe it. Yet the British government will do anything but address the problem, or that part of the problem that is its duty to address: the state-encouraged breakdown of the family. If one were a Marxist, one might see in this refusal the self-interest of the state-employee class: social problems, after all, are their raison d'être."
