Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What is crucial to understand is that this is all a question of politics: of who gets to shape our city – a handful of bureaucrats and capitalist investors, or the vast majority of a district’s inhabitants. It is this political question that frames the content and the outlook of urban space.
I’ve long argued that if the world survives great power warmongering and eco-apocalypse then the future it faces is most likely a small farm future. Heavy death taxes would be one way to expedite that future…
Municipalities should move quickly to enact high-end real estate transfer taxes, requirements for the disclosure of beneficial ownership, and regulations aimed at the disruptive impact absentee owner-investors are having on our cities.
This is not the previous generation’s gentrification. The housing crisis in many of our urban areas is not the result of normal real estate market forces. Local gentrification cycles have been “supercharged” by the fact that many cities are now a global destination to park investment capital.
“If you’re not building social capital in the community where you’re working, you’re not Placemaking; you’re just reorganizing the furniture.”
The story of Rossy’s Bakery exemplifies the way CDCUs are crucial actors in a city that is often inaccessible to all but the rich.
We’re developing the idea that because permaculture’s lessons apply so well in creating dynamic, healthy physical landscapes, they can probably do the same for cultural and social landscapes.
We must always ask: who is community resilience really for?
There are some exciting aspects to New Urbanism but there are downsides as well, including the displacement of lower-income people as new urbanism moves into an area.
The irony is that local public markets are what underlie, what grew, and what nurtured the larger global economy.
Focusing on talent attraction and retention is what leads to gentrification, the phenomena that people who voice concerns about Placemaking are most often trying to avoid. There is an oft-voiced belief today that there is a finite amount of talent and creativity available in the world, and that cities must compete to draw creative people away from rival communities in order to thrive. But truly great places are not built from scratch to attract people from elsewhere; the best places have evolved into dynamic, multi-use destinations over time: years, decades, centuries. These places are reflective of the communities that surround them, not the other way around. Placemaking is, ultimately, more about the identification and development of local talent, not the attraction of talent from afar.
