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Urban Design

After Death Of Radical Mayor, Mississippi’s Capital Wrestles With His Economic Vision

April 6, 2014 Laura Flanders, www.yesmagazine.org ,
On his way into work every morning, Chokwe Lumumba, the late mayor of Jackson, Miss., used to pass a historical marker: “Jackson City Hall: built 1846-7 by slave labor.” Mayor Lumumba had a plan. Believing that history of a new sort could be made here in Jackson, he sought to use public spending to boost local wealth through worker owned cooperatives, urban gardening, and a community-based approach to urban development. His vision, developed over years in social movements, not only prized black experience and drew on the survival strategies that black Americans had come up with over the decades, but also set out to prioritize in the city’s policies the very people who until now had been on the bottom of the state's list. The goal, he said, was “revolutionary transformation.”

What The US Would Look Like As Mega-Regions Instead Of States

February 6, 2014 Tom McKay, www.policymic.com ,
America 2050 project proposes that we begin to view the country's urban areas not as discrete metropolitan areas but as interconnected "megaregions." Megaregions are areas where large cities and the spaces in between share "interlocking economic systems, shared natural resources and ecosystems, and common transportation systems." They identify 11 in the U.S. — Cascadia, Northern and Southern California, the Arizona Sun Corridor, the Front Range, the Texas Triangle, the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, the Northeast, Piedmont Atlantic, and Florida (it's kind of dangling off on its own there, anyhow). In other words, these are the areas in which residents and policymakers are the most likely to have shared common interests and policy goals and would benefit most from co-operation with each other. It's especially important, because as the Regional Plan Association notes, "Our competitors in Asia and Europe are creating Global Integration Zones by linking specialized economic functions across vast geographic areas and national boundaries with high-speed rail and separated goods movement systems."

DC’s Poorest Residents Fight Gentrification

February 1, 2014 Rania Khalek, www.truthout.org , ,
Barry Farm, a public housing complex in southeast Washington, "is the line in the sand," says Schyla Pondexter-Moore, a community organizer. "If you take away Barry Farm, you're basically just giving away the whole Ward 8." Barry Farm is the latest battleground for grass-roots housing advocates in the nation's capital, where intense gentrification has altered the city's demographic landscape dramatically. Because Washington was America's first city to have a black majority, it came as a shock to many in 2011 when DC's black population dropped below 50 percent for the first time in more than 50 years. In the past decade, the district lost nearly 40,000 black residents, many driven out by skyrocketing rents fueled by an influx of mostly white professionals flocking to increasingly gentrified neighborhoods.

Cut Fatalities By Making Streets For People

January 26, 2014 Staff, www.streets-book.com ,
CITING AN INNOVATIVE NEW MOVEMENT known as Vision Zero, Mayor DeBlasio and NYC DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg have pledged to reduce traffic fatalities in New York City to zero in ten years. In response, the NYPD last week arrested six jaywalkers in the two-block area where three pedestrians were killed this month on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A jaywalker who mainly speaks Mandarin Chinese was apparently knocked down and roughed up by the police. New Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said the arrests were necessary because 66% of pedestrian fatalities in New York last year were ”directly related to the actions of pedestrians.” Commissioner Bratton’s view and solution are the opposite of what the city should be saying and doing.
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