iO9 article: Can your city be brought back from the dead.

[Skidmore]

This is the way a new world is built. Jobs too.

http://io9.com/can-your-city-be-brought-back-from-the-dead-1578477171?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow


AnnaleeNewitz

Can Your City Be Brought Back from the Dead?

The signs of a dying city are usually all too obvious. Houses and landmarks stand vacant, their walls crumbling into ruin; businesses are failing while residents' incomes drop; and young people are fleeing in droves to seek jobs elsewhere. But there are also ways to revitalize a city, and reverse its decline.

Photo by stari4ek

Rip Out the Highways

The task of revitalizing a city often means changing its infrastructure to reflect the way the world has changed since the city's heyday. In the twentieth century, many cities — from Seoul, Korea, to Portland, Oregon in the U.S., built massive freeways to welcome cars into their city centers. But over time, these freeways have created pollution and blight in the neighborhoods around them.

Nobody wants to live next to a freeway if they can help it, and thus the areas around freeways tend to be impoverished and neglected. As a result, freeway corridors have done the opposite of what city planners hoped they would 70 years ago. They are driving people out of the city, instead of inviting them to drive in.

Some cities have responded to this problem by organizing citizen revolts against planned highway projects. This happened in San Francisco during the 1950s, when activists stopped the construction of massive freeways through downtown, including one that would have blasted a hole through scenic Russian Hill. More recently, the mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, decided to chuck an enormous downtown freeway plan in favor of building an inner city greenbelt, bikeway, and public bus system that connects poor neighborhoods with the central business.

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[KamaAina]

1. I doubt it.

Economically speaking, San Jose is very much among the quick. So why does Google need to run those infamous buses all the way from San Francisco?

Because "America's 10th-largest city" is a giant . We had a powerful city manager back in the 1950s whose goal was to transform San Jose into "the Los Angeles of the North". He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. But that might be the answer: invest in transportation as L.A. has done (BART is coming in a few years), create some cool neighborhoods like Echo Park, and the techies may begin to take notice.

[Warpy]

2. The highways predated a lot of this city

so instead of chopping it into pieces, it is a system that allows people to navigate the long distances between different parts of town quickly.

Boston, however, was chopped into pieces by highways. They put the brakes on it while I was there, building a subway on land where neighborhoods had been gutted and allowing those neighborhoods to come back. The Big Dig started just when I left and buried the biggest elevated highway eyesore (and the scariest driving experience in North America).

Nowhere did a highway do more damage, though, than the Cross Bronx Expressway. That piece of road is uncommonly ugly and insanely destructive of a once vibrant neighborhood. It also saw the worst of the vandalism in those former neighborhoods in the 70s, making the buildings on either side look like they'd been bombed after they were abandoned by people who didn't want to live looking at an ugly highway.

Burying them is a great idea, giving neighborhoods strips of park land where they'd had huge barriers to cross on too few elevated walkways. Eventually, the periodic vents spewing smog won't even be a problem as electric, hydrogen and natural gas vehicles become more common.