Category: main street
Can Kickstarter Solve Urban Problems?
Over at the Design Observer Group, Alexandra Lange has a very thoughtful piece on how to use Kickstarter to fund public projects: Most of the Kickstarter projects under the Design tab congregate around the themes of bikes, cheese, typography and iAnything, yet there is now a subset of urban interventions. A plastic tent for a [...]
Young Adults Fuel Inner City Growth In Cleveland
In what would have been a startling turn of events just a few years ago, this story of the continuing rise of inner cities comes from the Cleveland Plain Dealer: When a new job brought Stacey Brown to Cleveland from San Francisco two months ago, she went looking for an apartment downtown. Her manager told [...]
Highway Deconstruction & Quality of Life
The City Fix highlights an interesting approach to improving the quality of urban life: The famed U.S. intellectual Lewis Mumford once said, “Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.” The recently released report on freeway removal from by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and EMBARQ (the producer [...]
America’s Greatest Main Streets?
Travel and Leisure magazine has put together a list of what they consider to be America’s greatest main streets. The work of such activists and preservationists is acknowledged each year by the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Great American Main Streets Awards and by the American Planning Association’s Great Places in America: Streets. We scoured [...]
Food Deserts? What Food Deserts?
The New York Times reports on two new studies that call into question the importance of so-called “food deserts” in the US: It has become an article of faith among some policy makers and advocates, including Michelle Obama, that poor urban neighborhoods are food deserts, bereft of fresh fruits and vegetables. But two new studies [...]
The Mauling of Enclosed Malls
We’ve mentioned this before. Enclosed shopping malls, those retail juggernauts of the 20th Century, are dropping like flies. Over at Greater Greater Washington, Dan Malouf has the latest from the Washington, DC area: The reasons malls have closed vary as much as the malls themselves. Some closed because they were housed in cheap buildings that [...]
