How to Build a Great City

That's the cover headline on a recent issue of Azure.  Inside, reporter Nelda Rodger asks, "Is a great city one that is thrilling to live in, or one where you never have to lock your bike?  Where buildings are tourist attractions, or where everyone rides public transit?  Can a great city be made, or does it make itself? "

A particularly timely article in the package is on Torino, Italy's motor city that is "remaking itself by redeveloping the railway lands bisecting the city and the industrial sites that grew up alongside them."  The city got a "huge kick-start" by landing the 2006 Olympic Winter Games, and this year, the city was named the first World Design Capital.  To celebrate, the city mounted "an impressive program of conferences, festivals, and so on that celebrate the city as a centre of art and architecture, shedding forever its image as a factory town."

Note this observation:  "Every aspect of the built environment does double, even triple duty."  Wouldn't it be nice if every time infrastructure is touted this week as the solution to our growing unemployment crisis, it was coupled with the criteria of doing double or triple duty?

This is a beautiful issue for city lovers that also includes stories on Toronto, London, Bogota's transportation system, urban farming, social housing in Chicago, bike lanes, and rail links for small cities. 

I especially liked these observations from the story on London: 

"Politicians love cranes; they need solutions within the time frames of elections, and cranes deliver them.  But only a limited number of problems respond to this kind of time scale. The result is a constant cycle of demolition and reconstruction that is seen as the substitute for thinking about how to address the deeper issues of the city."  (This is exactly the syndrome CEOs for Cities work on City Vitals was designed to address.)

"Cities are made by an extraordinary mixture of do-gooders and bloody-minded obsessives, of cynical political operators and speculators.  They are shaped by the unintended consequences of the greedy and the self-interested, the dedicated and the occasional visionary.  The cities that work best are those that keep their options open, that allow the possibility of change."

"The ones that are stuck -- overwhelmed by rigid, state-owned social housing, or by economic systems that offer the ppor no way out of the slums -- are in trouble.  A successful city is one that makes room for surprises.  A city that has been trapped by too much gentrification, or too many shopping mallls, will have trouble generating the spark that is essential to making a city that works."

  

Sean Benesh, November 17, 2008

Great blog. As I find myself stuck in a small city dreaming about being back in a bigger one when I read your posts I'm reminded of the place small cities have and the great things they have to offer. When I see my city go through so much effort to beautify the downtown and bring about change I have hope.

Link: www.theurbanloft.org

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