Creating Cities by Marcus Westbury I'll make it easy for you: buy this book. Creating Cities is an engaging, well-written overview of the Renew Newcastle effort in Australia that helped turn the moribund downtown of a fading steel city into one of Lonely Planet's top ten global travel destinations in 2011. But not only a breezy read and a feel good case study, this book is also a celebration of bottom-up urbanism, and citizens taking the revitalization of their city into their own hands. In contrast to the typical top down planning, … [Read more...]
Archives for May 2016
The Cultural Power of New York City
I've never been a huge theater guy in general, much less Broadway shows. So I never paid that much attention to it. But the smash success of Hamilton is something hard to ignore. And it really provides a window into the overwhelming cultural power of New York. Hamilton is a play that is running at a theater that seats 1,300 people. You'd think that by its very nature as one play, in one city, in a not that big venue, it would be limited in the effects it could have. But Hamilton turned out to be a sensation whose effects extended far … [Read more...]
A $63 Million High School Football Stadium Shows Changing Republican Values
A lot of so-called "movement" conservatives dislike Donald Trump because he isn't conservative in their view. Some of them have sadly concluded that much of their own base is not as well, being much more open to things like protectionist trade policy than in years gone by. Their focus has been on working class voter, but another chunk of the Republican electorate, namely upscale metropolitan Republicans, is also moving away from some traditional conservative positions. These middle to upper middle class Republicans have little interest … [Read more...]
Sun Belt Problems Come to New York City
Surging subway ridership in New York has driven a flurry of press recently, including this piece in the New York Times: Subway ridership in New York is in the midst of a resurgence almost unimaginable in the 1970s and ’80s, when the system was defined by graffiti and crime. Ridership has steadily risen to nearly six million daily riders today from about four million in the 1990s. But the subway infrastructure has not kept pace, and that has left the system with a litany of needs, many of them essential to maintaining current service or … [Read more...]
Indianapolis Blogger Gary Welsh Dies in Apparent Suicide
Gary Welsh, attorney and publisher of the blog Advance Indiana, died yesterday in an apparent suicide. Welsh was not only the most prolific blogger in Indianapolis, he was one of the oldest (starting in 2005, even before me) and certainly one of the most controversial. He also had a strong claim to make for himself as being the most important working journalist in Indianapolis. I never met Welsh in person. He was a gay Republican with strong Tea Party views expressed in a style of nearly perpetual moral indignation. While he was no fan … [Read more...]