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Segregation by Design: Greenwood and I-244

Tulsa is the focus of another recent article from a UK newspaper website: A story in the Guardian Online about the impact of expressway construction on Tulsa's Greenwood neighborhood, and the possibility of reviving the neighborhood by removing the north leg of the Inner Dispersal Loop. Twenty-five years before Don...

Posted by Michael Bates on August 5, 2023 10:57 PM

Watch this space: Notes on my Greenwood talk coming soon

Thanks to the organizers, speakers, and audience for last night's Ignite Tulsa event. It was a great experience, and I only wish I could have stayed through the entire program -- family needs called me home shortly after I spoke. I'm happy I had the chance to come back to...

Posted by Michael Bates on September 18, 2009 12:08 PM

How the "Great Divide" damages Tulsa neighborhoods

Here's a very insightful comment by someone with the handle "innercityartisan," posted next to my column about the PLANiTULSA small-area workshop for Forest Orchard, about the way expressways and other barriers to pedestrian and auto traffic on surface streets can blight a neighborhood. It also provides a picture of living...

Posted by Michael Bates on May 1, 2009 5:28 PM

Connectivity and cul-de-sacs

Charles G. Hill has brought together two interesting items about cul-de-sacs, those dead end streets often hailed as the acme of suburban living. One is a Washington Post report that Virginia is requiring all new subdivisions to have streets that connect to other subdivisions, rather than dumping all traffic out...

Posted by Michael Bates on March 26, 2009 7:12 AM

Comprehensive plan or commie plot?

This week in Urban Tulsa Weekly, I address some of the concerns raised by members of OK-SAFE (Oklahomans for Sovereignty and Free Enterprise) about PLANiTULSA, the process for developing Tulsa's first comprehensive plan in more than 30 years, and New Urbanism in a column with the title, "Comprehensive Plan or...

Posted by Michael Bates on September 17, 2008 3:57 PM

New Urbanist areas more crime prone?

Iain Murray has linked to a report called "The Cost of Policing New Urbanism". The report concerns "Operation Scorpion", a British research project to determine whether a new urbanist neighborhood is more "criminogenic" than the suburban cul-de-sac form. The report claims that a New Urbanist neighborhood requires three times the...

Posted by Michael Bates on October 23, 2003 11:47 PM