Urban Sprawl - We get what we ask for
Airbare wrote about his view of Midtown a while back. Now Mary Anna Towler over at City News delivers her weekly commentary - this time a dark commentary on sprawl and Midtown plaza.
This is indeed another of my regional-planning rants, but facts are facts. We have traded a vibrant downtown retail center for half a dozen suburban malls with little advantage or interest beyond convenience for the shoppers who live nearby.
Read the whole thing but this stood out.
Our sprawl is due to mindset, more than anything. We complain about gas prices and about the high cost of government that sprawl feeds. But until we want a different kind of community, we’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing.
Maybe we just don’t have a clear sense of what we want to be. We mourn the closing of Midtown, but too few people wanted to shop there. We want a vibrant community, with healthy retail and arts, but we think we can have one without a strong central core.
Our vision, I guess, is of a community of separate little communities.
Or whatever develops.
That’s what we have. And that’s what we’ll get in the future.
Itchy - I’ll turn it over to you….
I’m not Itchy, and maybe that’s why I have no understanding of why there’ s no comprehensive plan that incorporates use of the riverfront, the developing housing going on in Corn Hill and the High Falls Districts, the incoming business (which, granted, might not have been foreseen), and planning for retail for businesspeople and residents in the new housing areas. Why isn’t there an effort to blend retail with office buildings and residential? Why isn’t there a place for people to shop during the day? If the stores weren’t high end enough downtown, or didn’t offer enough variety, why can’t that be remedied at this stage with the development that’s going on?
No you are not Itchy. He is a now periodic RT poster who is passionate about sprawl - that sprawl is a bad thing. I expect Itchy to add his two cents at some point.
Re comprehensive plan, Excellent points.
You might consider latent racism or at least the use of racial fears to [promote sprawl.
Some time ago there was a book about Robert Moses and the New York expressway system which made exactly that point. In Rochester, the whole expressway system was built to bypass the racially troubled city.
Again I’m not saying everyone is racist but they did respond to appeals to disorder and the specter of racial conflict.
there is a clear racist undertone to our sprawl. but maybe the overtone is the anti social traits of the burbs (not including villages). lack of sidewalks, lack of front porches, and having to drive everywhere.
Having walked in a sprawl neighborhood, I can tell there is some attraction to living in “Levittown” - style housing with postage stamp size property, working for mediocre companies that threaten or has already shipped their jobs overseas, driving vans and SUV’s, being borderline or latently racist or just plain ignorant, and voting for the same damn line of Republicans year after year…not my life but hey, to each their own right?
Again
I don’t think that everyone in the suburbs is racist.I just think that there is an easy appeal here to fears of the “other” that is employed. In more isolation settings we do not have to be aware of the real diversity in the world that one might find in a more cosmopolitan area. Greece is good example of this kind of parochialism.