How Not to Fix Your City

Where Blog's Brendan has a MUST READ post (drawing on the insights of Dev Patnaik)  on five common "innovation myths" about how to fix cities.

• Over-reliance on high-profile, "sexy" projects

Big projects can be important to cities, but it's even more important to pay close attention to what trade-offs will need to be made in terms of basic services. ...

• Unhealthy fascination with unique, charismatic civic leaders

[G]reat mayors have often made names for themselves by bucking trends and trying new ideas that were responsive to their specific cities than following standard procedures being cut-and-pasted into other cities.

• Misapplication of other cities' approaches

Building on the previous point, it is often assumed that because Idea X worked in City Y, it will be equally successful in City Z. This is absurd. ...

• Descent into a cycle of self-recrimination

Pittsburgh, the oddball city so dear to my own heart, is the poster child for this kind of thinking.  ... To be successful today, all cities (Pittsburgh included) would do well to look back at their strongest points and learn how to replicate that kind of success.

• Resignation to superficial changes

Patnaik uses the example "Let's just paint the walls purple" to mock companies' shallow understanding of the funky interiors of creative business HQs -- most famously, the Googleplex. Cities have a long and storied history of believing in the power of cosmetic changes only to be let down by the results. A phenomenon that you might call Trinket Urbanism had a death grip on North American cities until relatively recently as every city rushed to have their version of one-off amenities built in other cities. ... Flowering medians do not a center of innovation make.

In my travels around North America and the world, I come across all of them all the time.

Comments

[Michael Wells]

This gives an opening for a question I've been wondering about. You write that investments in things like convention centers don't promote economic growth. I assume the argument is that a convention center doesn't help bring people to a failing city and boost its prospects.

Is this also true of a blossoming city that people want to come to? Are the economics different when it's not a rescue effort but building on success? Is attracting conventions to Portland a way to keep up the momentum? There's already a big convention center and current debate about financing an adjacent conference headquarters hotel. I can't decide if it's a waste of resources or not (not that they've asked me).

[Jim Russell]

I'm guessing you're pessimistic about Newark getting much benefit out of its new Prudential Center arena, then.

[Daniel]

Why did you have to single out my beloved Richmond, VA here?? ;-)

[Wayne Masters]

I'm thinking about the Roots and Blues Festival last August, a three day event in Salmon Arm, British Columbia. There was adjacent farm grazing land that was available for a tent city and as I volunteered dismantling the grounds after the festival it was so easy to get into conversations of mutual community related interest topics. Then they all left and the town has returned to speeding trucks on our city streets and a predominantly senior demographic look has returned. There are no futurists here and a buck is only worth a quarter if the livability index is factored in.
Will society prepare A & E communities in preparation for the retiring baby boomers gravitating here in the next five years? Will the community come together virtually? No. Will it come together through public meetings? No. Hence disappointment will be had by all in the future. Hold on to your TV character friends, they're all you will have in the years ahead. I know of a country that changed itself between 1956 and 1959 but that won't happen again. Communityists just aren't that prevalent.