Salon.com > Next American City

What’s your city’s personality?

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:58:00 +0000

No two cities are exactly the same, but some enjoy distinct looks that makes them unmistakable. Think of Parisian balconies with cast-iron banisters, chimneyed townhouses lining the streets of London, or the water towers and fire escapes of New York. Small quirks like these can add up to make a city instantly familiar to anyone in the world.

With this in mind, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a software program to determine exactly which features give certain cities their unique architectural character.

Using everyone’s favorite vicarious vacation dream machine, Google Street View, the researchers developed an algorithm that detects elements, such as a window, column or balcony, that are both distinct and occur with regularity inside a city. As explained in an accompanying video, this disqualifies singular landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, whose iron angles are distinct but don’t occur anywhere else in Paris. It also allows the program to ignore aspects like blank walls, which can be frequent but dull.

A university overtakes NYC

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 15:00:00 +0000

On Wednesday, the New York City Council voted unanimously 44-1 to approve a controversial expansion of New York University’s campus in Greenwich Village.

The vote was largely a matter of course. The plan — dubbed NYU 2031— passed the zoning subcommittee last week with the blessing of Council president Christine Quinn and Councilperson Margaret Chin, whose district covers the area in question, after the University agreed to a 20 percent reduction in density from the original application. The plan calls for 6 million square feet of new construction — 1.9 million of which will be built between Houston, Third, Laguardia and Bleecker streets, in the heart of the Village. The new construction, which will occur over 20 years, includes classroom facilities, faculty housing, retail space, at least four new towers and a 300-foot hotel.

When cities go bankrupt

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 20:23:00 +0000

Facing a projected $45 million budget shortfall, the City Council of San Bernardino, Calif. declared a fiscal emergency last Wednesday, a move that allows the city to file for bankruptcy protection immediately, bypassing the state-mandated 60-day mediation period with creditors.

San Bernardino is third in a list of California cities that have filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection — essentially, Chapter 11 for municipalities — in the past month. Compton, just south of Los Angeles, may join the list soon as officials have reported that the city is likely run out of money by the end of the summer. In late June, Stockton, a city of 292,000, became the largest-ever U.S. municipality to file for bankruptcy after three months of mediation with creditors failed to produce a deal to restructure more than $700 million of debt.

Creating a more inclusive Cape Town

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 13:40:00 +0000

Last week, Cape Town, South Africa was officially appointed the World Design Capital for 2014by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID). The distinction, which has previously been awarded to Torino (2008), Seoul (2010) and Helsinki (2012), “celebrates the accomplishments of cities that have used design as a tool to reinvent themselves and improve social, cultural and economic life.”

For Cape Town, the celebration of reinvention is particularly topical. The city will be accepting the award in 2014, the 20th anniversary of South Africa’s young democracy.

Can Brooklyn gentrify the right way?

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 20:58:00 +0000

When Jay-Z takes the stage to open the Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn this September, the show will be more than a homecoming for the hip-hop superstar from the borough’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

The christening of the arena, part of the Atlantic Yards complex under construction between Atlantic and Flatbush avenues, will mark a milestone in a transformation of downtown that began eight years ago, when the Bloomberg administration instituted a series of zoning changes with the goal of spurring development. The city also invested nearly $300 million in local streetscapes and other improvements and teamed with the state to build Brooklyn Bridge Park, a necklace of green along the East River that opened two years ago.

Brooklyn Bridge Park (Credit: Brooklyn Bridge Park)

Welcome to the age of non-profit city government

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 17:30:00 +0000

Sue Mosey spends a lot of time telling stories. When I first met her, she breezed through two hours of narration about the behind-the-scenes practicalities of cultivating a vibrant center in the city of Detroit, a story she is clearly well-practiced at delivering to the many national journalists who come to her with questions. A few days after our meeting, I saw her again at Fourteen East, a Midtown café that opened one year ago after Mosey inspired the owner to host her new venture on Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s central corridor. Mosey was at the café to pose for photographs before meeting a potential funder for lunch, where her strategic storytelling was again called upon — this time, to inspire concrete commitments for the non-profit that Mosey leads, and which, in turn, is headlining the city’s revival.

Segregation continues in urban schools

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:20:00 +0000

Nearly 60 years have passed since the Supreme Court made its landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision, legally ending school segregation across the U.S. Today, the legacy of school segregation persists, as racial isolation remains the reality of many students nationwide.

Though it is expected that the U.S. population will shift from a white-majority to a minority-majority by 2046, currently most students do not see that diversity reflected in their school experience. Nationally, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 52 percent of black students and 58 percent of Latino students attend school where minority students make up 75 percent or more of the entire student body.

Cities plan for families

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 02:00:00 +0000

This past weekend, Will Doig of Salon wrote an article detailing the motivations and challenges of city branding efforts. He spoke with Aaron Renn, an Indianapolis-based urban analyst, concerning the city’s latest efforts to capitalize on what Renn characterizes as a town that has “great schools, is family oriented [sic] and offers easily living.”

Some commenters on Doig’s article seized upon Renn’s assertion that Indianapolis had some vague, inscrutable quality that made it family-friendly.

When city officials invoke family-friendliness in their advertising strategies, what aspects of the city are they basing that claim on? Arguments from readers fell into three camps: It could be the availability of urban amenities like zoos, museums and public pools that the whole family can enjoy together. Or it might be a dog whistle alerting homebuyers and other in-migrants to the presence of a prevailing conservative cultural sentiment, reminiscent of a kind of “family values” rhetoric. Or it could be suburban-style development with the space and creature comforts demanded by a middle class that’s slowly moving back into cities.

Remaking Coney Island

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 12:00:00 +0000

A “new” Coney Island exists — if only on paper, in developers’ colorful renderings of bustling boulevards and in lengthy rezoning plans, The Brooklyn Bureau reports.

In 2003, New York City rolled out a 30-year plan to remake the once-grand beachfront on the southwestern tip of Brooklyn.

From the early 1800s through the early 20th century, Coney Island was widely regarded as the world’s greatest urban amusement park. Though Coney Island’s amusement zone has shrunk with every passing decade since the Great Depression, the area remains a relatively popular destination — nostalgic, easily accessible and cheap.

Making pro sports pro-green

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This past March marked exactly one year since a group of environmental activists, sports enthusiasts, and team and venue owners set out to make professional sports more environmentally friendly. After all, more than 70 percent of the energy powering sports arenas in the U.S. is produced from fossil fuels. In the NFL alone, each team fills the atmosphere with an average of 716 tons of carbon each game.

If anything, figures like those were precisely what pushed the Natural Resources Defense Council to join forces with teams from professional baseball, hockey, basketball and football and form the Green Sports Alliance in 2011.

On paper, at least, the mission is straightforward: Get stadiums to go green. Convince industries selling products to sports teams to clean up their acts. Turn that message into something beer-guzzling spectators can appreciate. In reality, it’s a tall order, especially when fans seem more interested in their teams’ performance on the playing fields than at the recycling bins.

The Web for the neighborhood

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 14:05:00 +0000

Candy Chang moved to New Orleans in 2010. A small, intense woman, her background was in architecture and design. She had been living in Finland, but like scores of idealistic twentysomethings, she found herself drawn to the Crescent City. She was lured by the notion of becoming part of the burgeoning recovery that was changing whole neighborhoods in ways nobody ever predicted before Hurricane Katrina turned reality on its head. As an artist, she saw a canvas.

New Orleans was changing fast in 2010. The city was still reeling from the storm — many citizens had either decided they were never going to return, or realized they would never be able to. Those that had made their way back, or coming for the first time, were carving away rot as quickly as they could. Others were settling comfortably into it. The Marigny and adjacent Bywater neighborhood — about two miles downriver from the already-restored French Quarter — radiated emptiness and energy in the span of a single block. It was a shell, and the future was up for grabs.

A quieter fourth of July

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:00:00 +0000

What’s a Fourth of July night without that jolting, yet familiar, crackle-and-snap?

It’s no secret that in an age of tightened budgets and high unemployment rates, cash-strapped cities are trying to find ways to cut corners. In many cities across the U.S. this year, fireworks displays will be notably absent from July Fourth celebrations.

With the traditional festivities in jeopardy, many communities have turned to corporate sponsors and local fundraisers to help foot the bill.

In New Rochelle, N.Y., a sum of $60,000 was raised through private donations, rescuing the annual fireworks event from cancellation.

Cities have not always been hard-pressed to raise such funds. During the 1980s through the ‘90s, more than 70 percent of public fireworks displays were paid for by government funds. Today, public donations and corporate sponsorships pay for 75 percent of the estimated 14,000 municipal displays across the U.S.

Some cities have gotten creative in their efforts to save money, and have explored scheduling fireworks events for a few days before or after the Fourth, in order to reduce police and firefighter overtime pay.