Earlier this week, the EPA designated Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal as a Superfund site, much to the chagrin of developers and local group Clean Gowanus Now! (their punctuation, not mine), two groups that generally prefer Mayor Bloomberg’s faster, cheaper cleanup plan, which (because it is faster and cheaper) would allow for major development projects to proceed much more quickly.
But as [...]
Thanks to the efforts of a few groups and many volunteers, Detroit just completed what is surely a prerequisite to crafting a coherent plan of urban rejuvenation: it took an inventory. Specifically, volunteers combed Detroit’s streets to determine and document the condition of Detroit’s nearly 350,000 residential parcels (not including buildings w/ more than 4 [...]
When Buffalo made the cut as one of seven cities that are primed for an architectural renaissance, it was understood that isolated instances of demolition would inevitably play a role in its rebirth. Abandoned homes, obsolete institutional and commercial buildings, that sort of thing. But it was not anticipated that rebirth would happen due to addition by subtraction [...]
When the National Guard deserted (most of) its post at the Kingsbridge Armory in 1994, few people knew what to do with the massive Romansque structure. Replace it with 10 schools? Amateur athletic complex? Offices? Apartments and condos? A shopping mall, perhaps?
Now that the latest - and most concrete - proposal (shopping mall, a few offices, etc.) has been [...]
Some months ago, I wrote about a Midwestern city’s struggle to restore and use its Art Deco movie theater. Despite the best efforts of local preservationists however, nothing ever happened and matters deteriorated so much that the downtown landmark is now a strip club.
Well, it turns out, much to my surprise, that such businesses are [...]
Saving an old, dilapidated building from the wrecking ball can be challenging - especially if you are not its owner and if local leaders, blinded by opportunistic developers, fail to comprehend its significance. Even if you succeed in thwarting its demolition, there is always the tricky issue of how to make the building’s preservation more [...]
Should the Gowanus Canal be declared a federal Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency?
As if PCBs, heavy metals, raw sewage, and brackish tidewater weren’t damaging enough, New York City’s Gowanus Canal won’t get an answer until the end of an on-going political battle among forces wielding nearly as much influence on its physical state [...]
A while back, I linked to a New York Times article about Flint, Michigan’s nascent foray into calculated “un-development” - which involves tearing down abandoned homes, removing the remains of public infrastructure, and returning the newly-emptied neighborhoods to nature.
Alone, un-development would do wonders for Flint; fewer abandoned/isolated homes would mean fewer “hotbeds” of crime, fewer [...]
As the New York Times recently reported, cities are beginning to consider other approaches to revitalizing neighborhoods in economically-distressed areas.
The strategy of shrinking the city’s phyiscal footprint makes a great deal of sense, really. With the exodus of people out of cities like Flint, Detroit, and Buffalo, it is simply impossible to redevelop and maintain [...]