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Articles by New Urbs
Why We Should Preserve Old Diners and Motels
A few months ago, the Internet news cycle noticed a Denver diner owner seeking to sell his retro ’60s property so he could retire. Given the changes to the surrounding area, selling meant redeveloping. And so he ran into a coalition of NIMBYs and historic preservationists—not always, but sometimes the same people—who, according to some, such as the libertarian Reason magazine, want to forcibly devalue a parcel of private property for their own private aesthetic pleasure.
Why Frank Lloyd Wright Loved to Hate New York
If you know the slightest thing about Frank Lloyd Wright, you’ll know that he abominated New York City in just about all of the colorful and scabrous ways that he could.
Is New Urbanism Only For Leftists?
Seaside, Fl., an early New Urbanist development (Flickr) Yes, the New Urbanists are coming for your neighborhood. And naturally, they are leftists. One recent notable example of such scaremongering is a Wall Street Journal piece entitled “New Left Urbanists’ Want to Remake Your City.” In Christopher Rufo’s telling, these urbanists promote a dastardly scheme to use zoning codes and control all aspects of an American city-dweller’s life.
Tracing Chris Arnade’s Steps in America’s Inner Ring Suburbs
I recently reviewed photojournalist Chris Arnade’s Dignity (and was fortunate enough to chat with him too). It’s a poignant and very important book and photo collection on the struggles of America’s poor communities of all geographies and races. What sets Dignity apart from similar books is that his photographs and anecdotes are not employed to prop up a narrative or to merely illustrate data. They are the narrative.
Meet TAC in New York City: A Conversation About Notre Dame
Last spring, the wide outcry at the fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris seemed to indicate that many people care about the West’s cultural inheritance from Christendom. Yet with so many Christian traditions threatened by both architectural and religious decay, is there hope for civilization? The French government has insisted it will rebuild, but will it be restored in a way that respects the cathedral’s Christian and Western heritage?
The Enduring City Is More Than Retail and Coffee Shops
[Editor’s Note: Please join author Duncan Stroik (with Rod Dreher and Michael Brendan Dougherty) in New York City on September 17 for a discussion of “Till We Have Rebuilt Notre Dame: A Conversation on the Future of Architecture, Faith, and Civilization in the West.“] When you go to a great European city, you find beautiful spacious piazze, outdoor cafes, charming shops, fountains to sit near, and people to watch. For many today, that symbolizes the good city.
Golden Age of Classicism
SOUTH BEND, Ind.—A year and a half hence, about the time the leafy Notre Dame campus begins to display brilliant autumn hues, budding architects and their mentors will move into a new building near the ceremonial entrance to the sprawling university. Though it will be the newest addition to this 175-year-old institution, built atop a former parking lot, the classically inspired edifice will appear to passersby as if it has been there for generations.
The Big-Box Mirage
Since Amazon has changed the way many Americans buy things, most of the big-box retailers have struggled. Fox Business recently reported that Walmart and its ilk are battling mightily to “fend off retail apocalypse.” But before the zombies come, the superstore giants want you to gas up and bravely drive over to your local strip center—at least once more, dear consumers—as legacy retailers try to create a new paradise in their old parking lots.
Beware the ‘Voodoo’ Urbanism of Elites
Over the last half-decade or so, a distressingly similar story has been heard from many cities around the world. Newly popular city cores are drawing more people, pushing up prices, and driving out small businesses and lower-income residents. City leaders, alarmed at the trends, try to build their way out of the problems, on the theory that more supply will better match demand, and result in lower rents and home prices. But the efforts don’t seem to work—and even seem to exacerbate the problems.
A Plea For Shade
Nicosia, Cyprus (Shutterstock) The July 4 heat waves that swept much of the U.S. might have had you wondering how people ever lived without air conditioning. For others, the frigid air that flooded offices and homes in response served as a reminder of our overuse of air-conditioning. Online, the annual battle royale over the use of air-conditioning has rekindled and the debate has fallen along familiar partisan lines. With new calls for a ban on air conditioning, things are heating up.
Are New E-Scooters a Menace or Needed Innovation?
Are today’s new motorized electric scooters an epidemic terrorizing American cities? In the New York Times, Nashville writer Margaret Renkl argues that the shared vehicles known as e-scooters are often abandoned in inappropriate places—such as in front of doorways, in the middle of the sidewalk, and on street corners.
At Least One Airport Terminal Is Worth Preserving-and Staying at Overnight
QUEENS, N.Y.—The appeal of airport hotels rests firmly in the realm of last resorts, an inviting place only compared to a night on a concourse floor. Until this summer, that is, when the new TWA Hotel opened at New York’s JFK Airport—likely becoming the world’s only hanger-side accommodations that make it worth taking a flight in its own right.
We Mortgaged Our Future With Overvalued Housing
Like it or not, the “Yes In My Back Yard” movement for more affordable housing is gaining steam. Last year San Francisco Mayor London Breed won a special election in part of support from organized Bay Area YIMBYs. Minneapolis abolished single-family zoning. The Sightline Institute reports that similar bills are in the works at the state level in Oregon and Washington.
Classical Architecture Makes Vibrant Streets-Not Nostalgic Disneylands
BOSTON—Nothing sticks out quite like a new building in an old city. It can be subtle, like the difference between brick, stone, or plaster that has been weathered, exposed to air pollution—in contrast with that which is clean and new. But new architecture can also be more radical: very often neighboring new buildings are made with different materials and constructed using new methods.
Brutal Truths
Few are immune to the architectural charms of Eastern Europe. Prague’s winding streets and medieval towers are a testament to the city’s enduring commercial vitality. The gothic imprint of German settlement can be seen as far east as Romania, where a distinctly Teutonic cathedral looms over the Brasov town square.
The Heartland’s Doughnuts of Despair
EUCLID, Ohio—Before so many bedroom communities were created after World War II, this Cleveland suburb was once a summertime vacation spot. With four miles of Lake Erie shoreline, it neighbored an amusement park and well-to-do holiday cottages. And if you were driving from Cleveland out to Geneva-on-the-Lake for putt-putt golf, skee-ball arcades, and big band music halls, you might have stopped in Euclid to pick up burgers and beer at Stevenson’s.
How Altoona Found a New Identity
Just over a month ago, my hometown of Altoona, Pennsylvania, was briefly in the national spotlight in the New York Times. Describing the tenth largest city in Pennsylvania as a place with “deep working-class roots, conservative social values and nearly all-white population,” the Times correctly characterized the city as an example of where Donald Trump received over 70 percent of its votes. But it did not go far enough in describing why he received those votes.
As Detroit Prepares for Clear-Cutting, Signs of Hope
Yesterday an Obama administration-convened task force released what the New York Times called “perhaps the most elaborate survey of decay conducted in any large America[n] city,” detailing the pervasiveness of perceived blight in the Motor City. The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force surveyed 377,603 properties, and recommended 40,077 for demolition, 38,429 for further review.
Traditional Cities Are More Resilient Than ‘Modern’ Buildings
Resilience is a hot topic in urbanism today—and understandably so, given the increasing prevalence of storms, floods, fires, heat waves, and other potential disruptions to urban well-being. But we might consider another level of organization beyond resilience—what has been termed “antifragility.” The term was coined by the Lebanese-American author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a rather colorful, sometimes controversial theorist and author who became prominent for his 2007 book The Black Swan.
Why Baltimore Abandoned Johns Hopkins’ Humane Vision
The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins: The Life and Legacy That Shaped An American City, Antero Pietila, Rowman and Littlefield, 336 pages. There are more than a few ghosts left behind by Johns Hopkins, the 19th-century Baltimore businessman; the man himself remains a generally benevolent apparition, others veritable poltergeists.
City Planning and Externalities Your Grandma Could Live With
Here’s a word you’ll almost never see planners use: “why.” But it’s a useful word when dealing with the dizzyingly complex world of development ordinances. Which, of course, are everywhere. Whether big or small, fat or thin, municipalities of all shapes and sizes relish the chance to churn out pages of code. Never, or not nearly ever, asking “why” these codes exist in the first place. Take Concord, New Hampshire. While a beautiful and historic city, “sunny” isn’t an adjective that jumps to mind.
Downtown Los Angeles Is Coming Home-to the New Elite
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote derisively about the state of Downtown Los Angeles in 1961: So spattered and decentralized are the central functions … that the only element of its downtown that has full metropolitan dimensions and intensity is that of the leisured indigent….
Urban Growth and the Fallacy of Control
I live in one of the faster-growing cities in one of the fastest-growing states in America. A common joke here in Florida is that the state bird is the crane. (Get it?) Needless to say, growth is a contentious and emotional subject around here. And growth control is a hot topic. And rightly so. Rapid growth can be disorienting and detrimental to the existing residents of a place—traffic jams where they didn’t used to occur, crowded schools and hospitals.
Toledo Bestows Lake Erie With Personhood
Anthony Wayne Bridge, Toledo, Ohio (Wikimedia Commons) TOLEDO, Ohio—About a month ago on a snowy afternoon, driving over the spindly 90-year-old Anthony Wayne Bridge, I couldn’t help but notice how this city seemed stuck in neutral. Behind me was the huge Toledo Refinery, a 280-acre gasoline processing plant, but set in a neighborhood where the houses appeared older and less functional than the industrial site.
‘Hello, Lollipop Dude’
The typical upper-class Englishman is as near to a Perpetual Schoolboy as can be imagined.
How ‘Interior Landmarks’ Redeemed New York
(Felix Lipov/Shutterstock) Though I spent my adolescent years living within an hour’s journey of New York City, such long-term close proximity exposed me to little more than glitzy entertainment, professional sports, glamour, fashion, and trendy-pseudo-art. I knew the city promised authentic high culture, but it was easy to overlook it in comparison to experiences in Rome, Vienna, Salzburg, and Paris.
When London’s Dragons Ruled Before Skyscrapers
Courtesy of Dhiru Thadani Historically, property boundaries were generally demarcated by a physical object, either by a boundary marker or a fence to visually communicate the edges of land ownership. These were human impositions that represented a cultural, political, and social meaning upon a natural environment or within a settled area. In present day, the use of markers for land ownership has largely been replaced by maps and land-title registration.
What a Tokyo Fish Market Can Teach Us About Urban Planning
Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market was once the largest fish market on Earth. It was a bustling distribution center that supplied Tokyo with most of its seafood. Established in 1935 after the Great Kanto Earthquake, the Tsukiji fish market grew into more than just an extra-large wholesale market. It also grew into one of Tokyo’s cultural landmarks, with a distinctive working-class civil society that attracts visitors from the world over.
Transit Gives Millennials an Off-Ramp From Cars
For generations of young Americans, a driver’s license stood as the ticket to freedom, freeing teenagers from the watchful parental eyes that accompanied being dropped off at bowling alleys, bookstores, and boyfriends’ houses. Living in a sprawling, vast country, particularly one whose postwar planning consensus had been dedicated to subsidizing suburban sprawl, a car was often the only feasible way to connect their geographically disparate destinations.
Hyperlocal Zoning Can Reset London-and American Politics
“All politics are local” was former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill’s favorite political adage, while the old saw that “politics makes strange bedfellows” is an unquestioned cliche, even in these hyper-partisan times. Taking the two together, it’s no surprise that the world of hyperlocal of zoning is a scary and weird mirror universe of America’s national political conversation.
Can Main Street Poach Talent From Wall Street?
James Fallows of The Atlantic has been touring the United States with his wife, stopping in small and mid-size cities to try and get a picture of what is actually working in American politics. He says they’ve found it in the nation’s mayors, who are exercising a strong hand of leadership to bring the best insights of urban planning and town development to their constituents, and revitalizing even economically stricken towns like former textile stalwart Greenville, South Carolina.
Are Suburbs Worth Saving?
The suburbs are often attacked from various camps, for their lack of originality and often dismal community. But Russell E. Saltzman defends his suburban existence at First Things: Fact is I like living here. I have met more neighbors here than anywhere else. The day we moved in, we met a dozen people who made a point of greeting us and one guy brought over some cookies.
Why Sprawl Goes Broke, but Cities Rebound
Suburban sprawl often comes under criticism for a variety of aesthetic, environmental, and social reasons, but one criticism rules them all, Aaron Renn writes.
Was ‘White Flight’ a Personal Economic Decision?
The switch in development pattern the United States experienced after World War II—one where major cities lost population while a new series of auto-oriented suburbs sprung up on their periphery—is often referred to as “white flight”. When this term is used to describe the results of those decades, it broadly makes sense. But I’ve always been confused when people use the term as a description of motive. As stated: white people did not want to live near non-white people, thus, white flight occurred.
The Threat of ‘Genius’ to Truly Successful Architecture
For the truly great projects, architects are necessary, and can take credit for magnificent structures like London’s St Paul’s Cathedral and Istanbul’s Suleymanyie Mosque. Nevertheless, most architects of the buildings we love remain anonymous, and those who designed the great Gothic cathedrals owe their achievements as much to the guilds of stonemasons as to their own astonishing plans. Moreover, by far the greatest number of buildings that we admire had no architect at all.
After Two Decades of Growth, Philadelphia Still Feels Left Behind
South Philadelphia’s rooftops offer a stunning panorama of a city balancing its past and future. A sea of row homes, occasionally broken by old school buildings and church steeples, flow northward toward Center City, where towers of glistening glass spread symmetrically within the confines of the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers. The 60-story Comcast Technology Center, nearing completion, is the tallest skyscraper, its structure reminiscent of a nineties-era cellphone.
A New and Misleading Story of Small Town Revival
For many people, the story of small towns outside the country’s major metropolitan areas is one of decline and disinvestment: businesses moving to more central or more populous locations, and factories and farms employing fewer people thanks to automation. As people move out, small businesses suffer from a reduced customer base—and now local retailers face even more competition from warehouse giants such as Amazon.
New Housing Can Spur Growth In Cities Left for Dead
Editor’s Note: This is part two in a two-part series on Rust Belt urban revitalization. Last week, in part one, Jason Segedy challenged the advocates of “managed decline.” Part two explores the new policy ideas leaders in Akron are using to spur growth in housing and residents. AKRON, Ohio—There is much discussion about the decline of the Rust Belt—in capital, jobs, influence, and most especially, residents.
Sometimes You Just Need to Move
BRAINERD, Minn.—I grew up on the farm that was homesteaded by my great-great grandparents. When I was a kid, we tore down and replaced the house they had built, and that others had subsequently added on to. The saying “if those walls could only speak,” has extra meaning for me, because we found many things within those walls—old newspapers, letters, trinkets long forgotten. My parents still live there. In fourth and fifth grade, I attended Lowell Elementary.
Vermont’s $10,000 Gamble
The small state of Vermont usually makes the national news for producing progressive politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders and legalizing same-sex marriage. But recently Vermont made the news for a different reason. Republican Governor Phil Scott (yes there are still Republicans in New England) signed a bill into law that will grant remote workers up to $10,000 to move to the state.
Photographing the Ruins of Rural America
For 23 years I have been driving country roads, photographing the ruins of rural America for a documentary I call “Lost Americana.” As population decline claims town after town, I’ve been talking to those who remain. Whether it’s in the place I’m photographing or in the cities where I’m showing my photos, all conversations lead to the same question: “How do you stop it?” The simple answer is, you can’t.
Rescue Cities for Families
[The American Conservative’s New Urbs project asked experts to respond to Benjamin Schwarz’s May/June 2016 cover story critiquing adult urban playgrounds. This is the first of two comments on “Cities Without Children.”] Our cities are entering a defining moment. The young professionals lured into dense, walkable neighborhoods have resurrected our urban cores and many of their adjoining neighborhoods.
The Lost World of the Middlebrow Tastemaker
Today’s home builders are “[r]eactionary, obstinate, restrictive, frightened of change, un-imaginative, profit-bent only…” and “the building industry is turning out thousands of cracker boxes…” for the masses in need of housing, who are “desperate and house-ignorant, clamoring solely for a roof over their heads, unmindful of their fearful destiny: the sickening realization a few years hence that they have mortgaged their incomes for houses which are ten to thirty years out of date—both in...
What to Do With Waterfronts?
Many city waterfronts used to be seedy industrial spaces: Dickensian areas once characterized by water trade and commerce, marked occasionally by squalor or disrepute. But as cities have changed, grown, and gentrified, our waterfronts are changing too.
Savannah’s Squares Inspire New Urbanists
SAVANNAH, Ga.—Unlike the 20th-century experiment that reinvented much of America’s built environment as suburban sprawl, colonial-era experiments in city design have proven to be both highly adaptable and enduringly beautiful.
Why Shared Space Scares
“Monderman..was pleased to hear that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous. This was music to Monderman’s ears.” Why should we want pedestrians to feel scared? Pedestrians are often the elderly, the disabled and children. Why should we affirmatively want them to fear for their lives when crossing the street? Drivers won’t feel scared, because they have weight on their side.
Vehicle Terrorism and Humanity’s Crooked Timber
Here’s a thesis statement for New Urbanists to consider: it’s hard to enjoy being a flaneur if someone is trying to mow you down with a motor vehicle, or if the cops are shooting to stop the mowing. That is, a pedestrian taking in the sights ought not to have to worry about being struck by a car or truck, or perhaps being hit by a stray bullet.
There’s No Such Thing As ‘Suburbia’
I and my fellow writers here have often written critically about suburbia: see “What to Do When Suburbia is Your ‘Hometown,’” “Suburbanizing History: Northern Virginia’s Identity Crisis,” and “The Slow Death of the Shopping Plaza.” Reading the comments and Twitter reactions to these pieces, I realize there’s a question we should probably answer or at least discuss more often: what is “suburbia”? As the saying goes, know your enemy. There’s no one answer to that question.
Modernism, Food, and Public Space
Even on a warm late summer evening, many streets of Midtown Manhattan’s east side feel oddly desolate. A few blocks south of Central Park, along what has been called “corporate row,” the modernist office towers lining Sixth Avenue enter a slumber, most of their workers having gone home. Yet as the wide artery reaches the corner of 53rd Street, there is life on the wide sidewalks, as dozens line up at food carts.
How a Denver Coffee Shop Exploded the Gentrification Debate
The “gentrification” phenomenon unfolding in many American cities shows no signs of abating, as “gentrifiers” move into deteriorated urban neighborhoods, renovate homes, start new businesses, and pave the way for other people of higher incomes to follow. The result is usually the transformation of those neighborhoods. Of course such transformations often entail significant changes in the socioeconomic mix of the area and often in its ethnic and racial composition as well.
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