This is the last of my entries prompted by my recent trip to Columbus. I've noted before that Columbus and Indianapolis are twin cities in many ways, though with some important differences. One of those differences is that the civic discussion in Indianapolis today is heavily driven by the urgency of reversing the decline of Marion County as the city of Indianapolis increasingly loses out demographically and economically to its suburbs. In Columbus, by contrast, I didn't sense nearly the same concern about suburban competition. While again I … [Read more...]
Archives for June 2014
The Downtown Dallas Experience
My post Sunday on Dallas in transition put the development of the metroplex into context. Today I want to zoom in and look more specifically at the experience of Dallas from the standpoint of a visitor attending a downtown event. This is a critical experience to get right because that and transiting through DFW may be the only experiences people from outside the city have with it, and it can be determinant in creating an impression. I first visited Dallas in 2007, and gave the city's downtown experience a failing grade, writing: What I’m … [Read more...]
Dallas: A City in Transition
Dallas Skyline. Source: WikipediaI was in Dallas this past week for the New Cities Summit, so it's a good time to post an update on the city. I don't think many of us realize the scale to which Sunbelt mega-boomtowns like Dallas have grown. The Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area is now the fourth largest in the United States with 6.8 million people, and it continues to pile on people and jobs at a fiendish clip. Many urbanists are not fans of DFW, and it's easy to understand why. But I think it's unfair to judge the quality of a city without … [Read more...]
Disrupting the Disruptors
Jill Lepore's attack on "disruption" and on Clayton Christensen's "innovator's dilemma" model of industry dynamics in the New Yorker kicked up quite a stir. Called "The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong," Lehore lays out a multifaceted skeptical case against the notion of disruption. Her piece combines several different arguments together without clearly distinguishing them, but I identify four basic questions she attempts to answer: 1. Does disruptive innovation exist, at least as a model for understanding … [Read more...]
Los Angeles Union Station: Looks Great And Works Well, Too!
This is part of the series North America's Train Stations: What Makes Them Sustainable or Not? Photo of welcome desk looking into the grand waiting room on the right and the former ticketing hall on the left; courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Let me recap the theme of this series: to compete against the car and win over commuters, stations must ease connections between modes. How LA does this matters, nationwide, for it helps build a strategy that breaks transit out of today’s trap of red ink and taxpayer dissatisfaction. Transit’s case … [Read more...]
Where Is Local Governance Likely to Be Reinvented?
Where can we expect real urban change in the way cities and regions manage themselves? So far, in this recession, we’ve seen the emergence of “tactical urbanism”, a kind of low-cost, grass-roots redevelopment of small urban spaces borne out of a lack of money and more formal urban plans. That’s not to put down the good this has created, but where and how can we expect to see cities, many if not most now stopped dead in their tracks in real revitalization, begin to move forward ahead again? Where will we see new management approaches that make … [Read more...]
Columbus, Know Thyself
After my "Checking In On Columbus" post last week I was surprised that quite a number of people in Columbus, though a minority, took great exception to it and posted a number of negative comments about the post and me. I had thought it was a mostly positive take and I'm long on record has being bullish about the city and its future. I asked someone I knew there about this and he suggested that Columbus had a history of insecurity, highlighting an incident a while back in which, upon visiting a fantastic Japanese restaurant in a suburban … [Read more...]