New Column

My latest column (3rd) is up at D Magazine. Well, latest is a funny way to put it, since I wrote this over a month ago and my actual latest (4th) is getting placed into the InDesign file for the February issue as we speak. It is actually my favorite yet. This one is my 2nd favorite, but extra super fave of those that have been published to date.

Click the linky if you feel like reading it. It takes on the local notion of "Main Street Town Centers" and their execution. The developers heart was in the right place. You can tell by all of the expense they went to adding urban design element after urban design element. But it was like trying to bake a cake with all of the ingredients and no proper instructions or measurements. The result is a vat of goo.

It is also a lesson that good urban space don't require the knicknacks. Via del Corso, the prime commercial "main street" in Rome, the center trivium linking Piazza del Popolo to the "wedding cake" has none of these things. What it has is convergence and proper interface between conduit and site.

On Newstands Today

If you have been wondering why content here has slowed quite a bit recently, one of the many reasons is that I have begun writing a monthly column for D Magazine. The November issue should be hitting shelves today (sadly displacing the BEER! issue) with my very first column in it, so pick up a copy.

Here is a link to the online version.

Last Book Club Posting

Here is my Friday column for the Dallas Morning News book club blog. The theme for the day is "anything goes" so I might have gone too out there. I don't think any regular readers here will be too surprised by anything there as it is mostly repackaged thoughts that have found a home on this blog before. I guess if this blog is an extension of what is on my mind, that seems inevitable.

Looking back on the week that was, I quite enjoyed exploring new topics even if I framed them all towards a purview I was more comfortable with, ie urbanism. We were told to keep posts to 350-words, but when given the go ahead by the editors, most of mine ended up pushing 1,000 just behind a "read more" jump. Who can possibly express a thought coherently in a couple hundred words?! More concise, better writers than me, I suppose. But if all writing is at least somewhat self-indulgent, as with all indulgences, oh I indulge. Let the several million words on this here blog be exhibit A.

An excerpt:

In City (re)building, as soon as the lenders figure out how to evaluate land potential properly, which is directly related to the key element of urbanity: connectivity and all of its various permutations, we can once again be off and running economically. My hope is that we can get to a world where growth means something more than just getting fatter. It means getting smarter, getting better, as a people and a City. Where it improves everything around it, does not diminish quality of life for others, the character of a neighborhood or the City, the environment, but rather is additive. Only then can we fully unleash the true power of capitalism, where growth is profitable economically, environmentally, aesthetically, and socially.

Imagine a form of wealth generation with auxiliary profits where buildings function as trees and produce their own energy, if not more. Or, where a factory acts like the soil where its processes result not just in intended product but also in clean, potable water as an output. That is the kind of world I want to live in, in 2050.

The City of the Millennial(s)

My Thursday post is up on the DMN book club blog. The theme for today is Generations, Religion, or Family Values. Or perhaps, I made that up kinda like eyewitness testimony is less factual and more influenced by "lowest personal culpability compatible with credibility" as Tom Vanderbilt cites in Traffic about interviews with those involved in car accidents. Enough rambling, an excerpt from today's entry entitled, "The City of the Millennial(s):"

The parents, now grandparents, are put into homes where their entire mobility is dependent upon their own diminishing driving capacity. They lose their independence and vigor and are effectively warehoused. The children, the latch key kids are bused to/from school, which increasingly look more and more like warehouses than prideful centers of community (with nothing to say about what busing does to school budgets), and thereby limited to where they can go within the reach of foot or bike in the gated community. They become dependent upon working mom and/or dad to get anywhere, stunting the growth of their own responsibility.

What if this trend line towards more broken homes does not reverse and thus extends toward infinity like the rest of his assumptions? Millennials, ever the social creatures, have found family by proxy. Not only are they willing to live in multi-generational households, but also they are also more willing to take on roommates. This possibly is partly due to a laggard economy. Another piece of the puzzle is their desire to extend their more collectivist college lifestyle into their new professional world. This also could possibly be indicative of their extended adolescence that some psychologists suggest now last into their early thirties, particularly for males (my sister had a term for these types, "boy babies" - I'm sure women frustrated with the immaturity of their dates, my girlfriend included, can commiserate). Remember their stunted maturation of personal responsibility from the "family-friendly" gated communities?

Decentralized Relocalization

My new post is up at the DMN blog and as you can see, it is entitled Decentralized Relocalization where I counter Kotkin's market-related reasons for decentralization with why those decentralizing forces actually project towards a renewed localism. An excerpt:

The most valuable places, those in greatest demand, have always and will always be those with the highest degree of interconnectivity. As Lewis Mumford states, transportation must be made for all distances and speeds, whether leisurely or hurried that we desire. In his stead, we could probably add real or digital, as there will also be a vast market for improving linkages not just between people but also between the parallel geography of places virtual and real.

Lastly as previously mentioned, is energy. While Kotkin suggests a correlation between decentralized energy and decentralized people, the decentralization here actually just means produced by the many rather than the few. This also benefits from clustering of people, locally- or neighborhood-based power producers benefit via lack of transmission loss as energy has much less distance to travel than from centralized power plants.

All of which points back to our cities and improving those which we already have. There will be no new pop-up cities like Ordos or giant mega-buildings like Burj Khalifa, both of which were entirely supply-side and remain empty. Rather we will focus on qualitative growth and incremental improvement

More Book Club Postings

My second posting is up over at the DMN book club blog, this one is entitled A Tale of Two Valencias, now with more self-referential linking!

Valencia, California is just one of those many centers orbiting around downtown L.A., perfectly blending rural character with urban amenity as he puts it. Because of this rural meets urban compromise, each person that moves there, marketed to about the rural ambience, degrades the very commodity they are marketing. On the other hand with traditional urban development, that which is about qualitative growth rather than quantitative, each new resident adds to the community thereby increasing its most marketable trait. After spending much of the book bashing European city form, the irony of a transplanted European developer attempting to recreate the familiar village clusters of his youth is apparently lost on the author.