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I am sitting in the lobby of my hotel in New York City waiting for my room key. My flight landed at 7:30 this morning and I spent several hours walking around the city taking it all in. It’s 2:30pm now, my feet hurt, and I am ready to rest a bit and get caught up on my email.
I am here for a seminar tomorrow with Seth Godin, a marketing and business writer who’s work we frequently reference and put to good use at LJ Urban.
It was interesting walking around the city today, the optimism in the air is almost intoxicating while at the same time there is an oppression that seems to rest on the other half of the population. Its like there are two separate economies clashing together constantly and never mixing at any point.
I love the ever near subway stations and oceans of people walking.
Today is particularly odd in that there are far less taxis on the road. I guess there is strike going on which is creating a rare occurrence here in the city of less congestion.
I enjoy the mix of old and new architecture blending together with the seemingly endless construction. It’s as if the buildings never rest. I love that the neighborhoods each possess their own distinct identity and feel
Being here always makes me think of what Sacramento will be in 100 years. Will we have so many mistakes to overcome? Will we be as successful at building efficient mass transit? Will we be able to create a place that encourages community or will we create chaos? Will our growth push the lower class further down or will we rise to the challenge of building up everyone in our city? Is that even possible? Will the suburbs that are being built today even still be standing? Or more importantly, will freeways be in use?
I don’t for a second propose that I have all the answers. I only want to be the one that gets people moving forward. Sometimes it will be messy sometimes we will have to back up and fix things but one thing is for sure that we cannot continue the way we have been going.
I really want to put this out there as a question. What do we need to be doing as a city? What lessons can we learn from other cities and more importantly where do we start?
Any ideas?
1 response so far ↓
1 E // Sep 14, 2007 at 4:20 pm
I lived in NYC for 5 years (1999-2004). I even had the pleasure of studying the crazy discipline of “urban planning” in that city. Funny enough, NYC was hardly planned (at least for the first several hundred years), but it’s still one of the most vibrant, cosmopolitan cities in the country.
When we talk about moving forward as a city here in Sacramento, there are oodles of lessons to learn.
We need to grow inwards and upwards, not outwards. We need to figure out as a community how to prioritize infill and revitalization rather than sprawl, and do it in a way that benefits everyone, not just the yuppie or mostly-single “creative class” (although they’re important). The fiscalization of land use has resulted in the inability of our leaders to say no to sprawl, so we need to be creative in finding another way to grow and sustain what we already have. I don’t know of a lot of successful solutions from other cities. This is a huge problem in America – making infill attractive in urban cores where land values alone seem to make or break good projects. There are lots of redevelopment models out there, it’s a question of finding what would work best in Sac.
We need to stop over-subsidizing freeways and free parking, and find creative solutions to revinvest in transit, bike and pedestrian infrastructure. One great way would be to stop requiring so much on-site parking. (Has anyone read “The True Costs of Free Parking” by Shoup?) Also, the very basic concept of designing “complete streets” hasn’t really caught on yet. It’s talked about a great deal, but traffic engineers are still prioritizing the car over these supposed “alternate modes”. There are dozens and dozens of great examples, both in Europe and here in the US, where streets are designed to encourage people to get out of cars. Sadly, Sacramento still has long way to go.
We need to start creating complete neighborhoods that reflect the diversity of the city, not continuing the status quo of single-family large-lot subsidivisions linked to distant strip malls and power centers. I don’t know many neighborhoods in this town that are very accepting of the need for this change. Most equate apartments, townhouses and mixed-use with “low income” and “crime.” Getting beyond this misperception is a difficult one. I think the best planning and revitalization strategies are those that are grassroots. Force-fed change, either from government or the private sector, is usually met with fierce resistance. So we need to find a better way to support community-based efforts.
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