It hurts. When a bigtime Harvard economist writes off your city as a loss, and says America should turn its back on you, it hurts. But Ed Glaeser's dart tossing is but the smallest taste of what it's like to live in place like Buffalo. To choose to live in the Rust Belt is to commit to enduring a continuous stream of bad press and mockery. I write mostly about the Midwest, but whether we think Midwest or Rust Belt or something else altogether, the story is the same. From Detroit to Cleveland, Buffalo to Birmingham, there are cities across … [Read more...]
Archives for March 2012
The Sorry State of American Transport
We constantly read about the infrastructure crisis in America. I'll have more to say on this at a future date, but it is pretty clear that we need to spend more money in a whole lot of areas: airports, roads and bridges, public transportation, and more. Yet it's very easy to see that so much of what ails transport has nothing to do with a lack of funds and everything to do with a lack of will. I took a train ride on the Northeast corridor last week that really drove it home to me. Start with the sorry state of Penn Station in New York … [Read more...]
Civic Iconography Done Right – Chicago’s City Flag
I've written on a number of occasions on why cities should look to strengthen their visual identity and distinctive character using civic icons or images that can provide a powerful graphical or design representation of the city. For example, I wrote about I wrote about how London's use of its civic icons - it's red buses, black cabs, bobby uniforms, phone booths, and tube logo - had assumed an almost totemistic stature there. In the United States, I'd have to rate Chicago far and away #1 in the use of official civic symbols (maybe the best … [Read more...]