Passing For Knowledge

Take a look through this gallery.

Do you see urban decay? Can you even tell it’s in an urban setting? The Bergen Arches constitute a right-of-way slated for capital construction.

The New Jersey Department of Transportation’s 2002 report (a “final draft”) on the Arches ennumerated these potential usages: (more…)

In March of 2008 Boston implemented a new zoning ordinance limiting the number of “full-time undergraduate” students allowed to live in an off-campus housing unit. Leases prior the the passing of the zoning amendment weren’t grandfathered in — they had about six months to comply, and even had to file a declaration that they were in violation and were going to rectify the situation (see page 2).

What exactly did the amendment entail? (more…)

Charles Wang, owner of the New York Islanders, has been taking some major losses trying to keep the franchise afloat. The team’s viability in Long Island hinges on Wang’s ability to build a new stadium/shopping/condo/hotel megaplex.

Wang ran into some problems, though. Kate Murray, the Hempstead Town Supervisor who oversees the re-zoning necessary for the project to go through, had no support for the project up until recently. Wang was threatening to bail on Long Island all together if he didn’t get the project. It’s hard to blame him, and even harder to understand Murray’s opposition. Who wouldn’t want to keep a team that won 4 Stanley Cups in the 1980’s, in a county with an otherwise stagnant economy?

But tucked in the supporter’s push for this project is a vision for a new suburban model. (more…)

By way of introduction: A historical perspective on development

Boston's North End is perhaps most similar to Manhattan's West Village (Jacobs's "home turf") with its winding streets and historic buildings, and has been the target of 15 years of gentrification.

“Why in the world are you down in the North End…[T]hat’s a slum,” Flower Power-era planner/activist Jane Jacobs’s friend said to her. “It doesn’t seem like a slum to me,” she retorted. Jacobs was a visionary who attacked the “bird’s eye view” planning consensus. A generation of planners had fallen into the trap of judging neighborhoods only in terms of spatial utilization and density figures, and re-envisioning them with “appropriate” numbers. It’s easy for a city planning commission to then approve a plan, even if it completely relocates thousands of people, as long as it looks good in diagrams. This “top-down” method of planning views culturally-rich neighborhoods with diverse uses as eyesores, steamrolls them, and places a lovely park, apartment complex, highway, or convention center (complete with above-ground parking lot, naturally) in their place.

Yet Jacobs lived in a different time. Her solution was a push toward “organic” neighborhoods (like the West Village in Manhattan). Her audience was the planning audience – technocrats and developers – and not so much the communities themselves. While she longed for planners to get a true, on-the-ground, feel of a neighborhood, this doesn’t directly enfranchise the community members in the planning process. Jacobs’s irrelevance to the modern day is that she assumes a sort of “respect” for the communities’ wishes will be kept if the planners got a feel for what they wanted. But this isn’t a strong enough approach, especially after an overall trend of 50 years toward deregulation in development. (more…)