| good prose. i find it quire relevant, anyone care to take a crack | at pro-slum, pro-spontaneous-urbanism, pro-blah-blah, | pro-'people' etcetera majority around here? many of | whom are American educated, or US-Sponsored, | and it has been noticed, the arguments advanced around | often just replace the word "sprawl" with "slum" or | the equivalent --
The strange career of an ‘urban expert’ .... Compounding the offense is that Kotkin wants it both ways. He ridicules or misrepresents New Urbanism and then turns around and presents New Urbanism’s accomplishments as if they were his own. Last November, for The Planning Center (a southern California planning firm for which Kotkin is “senior advisor”), he produced a lengthy report titled “The New Suburbanism: A Realist’s Guide to the American Future.” It argues that challenges “cannot be met by returning to the urban past or by denying people the privacy, safety, and opportunity represented by suburbia.” After criticizing those who identified the placelessness of many suburban settings, he shows off many new urbanist places — Mashpee Commons, Orenco Station, Highlands Garden Village, Reston Town Center, Addison Circle, Santana Row, and others — as examples of how to develop properly. cont'd.... http://www.newurbannews.com/CommentaryMar06.html ======================================= Don't confuse prevalence of sprawl with desirability .... It's not that loss of open space makes us less able to feed ourselves. It's that we need large, contiguous tracts of undeveloped land to preserve habitats for plants and animals. We need vast natural areas to protect our water supplies and provide drainage. It might not yet be clear precisely how much land we need, or where, but there are already signs that rampant development is tainting our watersheds, depleting our aquifers, and killing our fish. While there have always been suburbs, today's development is on an entirely new scale. Bruegmann is right when he notes that some suburbs are becoming denser, more urban places without the heavy hand of government. There are good suburbs and bad ones. The best, for both environmental and quality-of-life reasons, are the denser ones that offer residents a choice between using the automobile or transit - such as Chevy Chase, Md., or Haddonfield. They're desirable places despite behaving and looking a lot like Philadelphia's Mount Airy. Bruegmann contends that Americans left the cities and moved to subdivisions out of "choice." But it's more plausible that they decamped because the suburbs offered better schools, bigger yards, and the perception that they were safer. Not all suburbanites reject urban-style housing or urban bustle. Indeed, the recent fascination with New Urbanist-style suburbs suggests that many people like the idea of living on small lots, near walkable shopping. If cities could also match the suburbs with amenities, they'd give them a run for their money. Unfortunately, the regulatory deck has long been stacked against cities. Bruegmann is right that some people will always gravitate to the next suburban frontier. But that doesn't mean our government policies should encourage them. cont'd.... http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/14018228.htm _______________________________________________ in-enaction mailing list http://mail.architexturez.net/mailman/listinfo/in-enaction + Architexturez collaborative at http://portal.architexturez.org/
