KH wrote: > it is a status good to have an urban area to call downtown, even > if your city is only 25 or 30 years old and, for all practical intents and > purposes, a suburb. In America, why go patronize someone else's run-down > far-away urban core when you can build one in your own back yard?
Speaking this way of "Community as the next Status Good?", I am reminded that under slightly different terminology, community has been recognized as a status good for a long time: it's called *NEIGHBOURHOODS*. The mere mention of the term and it's obvious. Everyone knows that the neighbourhood you live in, and who your neighbours are, is all about status. And in market economies, "who your neighbors are" is an item of commerce and priced accordingly. There is alot to say about neighbourhoods, status, and community -- better and worse neighbourhoods -- so the question of how to integrate such things into a larger account will require some reflection. By the way, somebody (?) wrote: > Community is already being packaged as a status good all over America. In > the Midwest, it is achieved through a vehicle called "Smart Growth". Out > East, it is called "New Urbanism". Various regional governments are > pushing these concepts as a way to solve regional issues through creating > more density, and thus less sprawl. Whatever it is called it involves > incorporating mixed uses in new developments and building ... > it is sold by herding local > residents into a series of open meetings to talk about problems and > perceptions of their part of town and then selling the finer points of more > dense development of a certain price point. People mostly go along with it > because there is a healthy portion of words like 'vision', 'community', and > 'long-term solution' used to describe the development... I find this description of regional planning rather too cynical. What is being described is a result of two things merging together: (1) the recognition by pols and community leaders that for a number of pretty obvious reasons "growth" *must* be managed and not left to an unregulated market in land, and (2) again, for a number of obvious reasons, citizens must have a role, a say, in the process and in the results. The regional planning processes that have developed and been legislated in the "Greater Vancouver Regional District" (GVRD) over the last 20 years or so are, I understand, widely admired and working pretty well. (You could think of such activities as aiming at creating good neighbourhoods, with "downtowns", rather than acres of bedrooms. And I suppose it is then a good thing if such "downtowns" vie for status.) Stephen Straker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Vancouver, B.C. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
