The immortal words of John F. Kennedy are quite relevant these days. But change the word “country” to “community” and you get “Ask not what your community can do for you, ask what you can do for your community.” That how I look at it. I believe strong neighborhoods and community bonds are vital to democracy, and it is up to neighbors to work together to make it so by being involved at the local level and electing sensible officials who will make good decisions at the higher level. The work of Richard Florida and the “creative class” is interesting…

Three recent articles got me thinking about neighborhoods and their importance in society. The first, a column by David Brooks in the New York Times, was a discussion of the rise of conservatism in Britain. It contains references to the importance of neighborhoods, community, and dense social bonds as ways to improve society rather than top-down government policy. I’m no expert on British politics, but it strikes me that the notion of strong neighborhoods and community can be both a liberal and conservative virtue. All politics is local, right? Dare I say it, neighborhoods may be the only places where…

Kids are easy to entertain in a city. Ellis and I made a visit to Chicago a couple months ago, and all I had to do was ride the train, or just see a train. He could stand under the “L” and watch all day. To see for yourself, watch the video of Ellis on You Tube here. It starts with him going crazy yelling “train, train,” then pivoting his head to watch the cars go by. Then he says, “Bye, bye, train.” At the very end he says “another one?” We had a nice couple of days, walking the…

Check out my latest article in the May 2008 issue of Urban Land entitled Suburban Snapshots. Why write about suburbs? I’m an urbanist, after all. Well, suburbs are fascinating places and represent a huge amount of overall development. Plus, I was intrugued after visiting Dutch suburbs last year to see Columbia, Maryland and The Woodlands in Texas. I greatly enjoyed Columbia and The Woodlands. In my opinion, they are superior places than their immediate neighbors, or many other suburbs for that matter. But Almere in the Netherlands, is quite mind-blowing. Besides the wicked-cool architecture (some would call it experimental), the…

I have seen the future, and it is collective. I speak of the Collective, a development in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that was mentioned in a recent Economist article called The New Oases. The article was part of a larger special section about Nomads, or “knowledge workers” who aren’t tied to a location-specific office. The Collective provides an answer to this segment. Developed by Bob Dykstra, the Collective is part executive office, part health club, with guitar lessons, a climbing wall and coffee shop thrown in for good measure. I visited last month as part of an assignment for an upcoming…

In January of this year, I participated in an all day charrette as part of the Great City Design Team initiative, the brainchild of Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak. The intention is to take a commercial corridor or node of the city that needs improving and design a solution. We gathered a group of designers, architects, landscape architects, and other members of the development community, and just like the numerous other charrettes around the city, came up with some really cool streetscapes, open spaces and building massing for an area of Glenwood Avenue, just west of downtown. Design is important and…

The last time I surveyed the Twin Cities condo market was first quarter 2006. I updated the data for first Quarter 2008, and as one would expect, the market has worsened considerably since then. Sales have, of course, slowed. Numerous projects have been cancelled, stalled or converted to rental or senior housing. Unsold units on the market are mostly in completed buildings, which is bad news for developers. The good news is the market has self-corrected considerably, and some projects in the best locations continue modest sales. The condo boom began in the Twin Cities in 2002-2003, when the number…

I recently visited Philadelphia as part of a trip to Washington DC. I flew in to Philly and took Amtrak to DC, which saved quite a bit on airfare despite the train fare. The bonus was getting to explore Philadelphia some more, including their gorgeous 30th Street train station, Rittenhouse Square on a summer’s evening, the Reading Terminal Market, and the efforts to keep downtown tidy. Center City Philadelphia is a business-led organization whose mission is to keep downtown Philadelphia clean, safe, beautiful and fun. They achieve this through a Business Improvement District (BID) that encompasses a 120-block area in…

Last week I had the good fortune to travel to Washington D.C. to attend the Blueprint for American Prosperity, an event by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. The Blueprint was the culmination of significant research and several publications on how our metro areas are the economic engines of the American economy. The timing of the event, or “Summit,” as it was called, was to advance an urban agenda for this year’s presidential election and the new congress and president in 2009. The core argument is our 100 largest metropolitan areas (cities and surrounding suburbs) contain 65 percent of our…

A recent tour of several public housing redevelopments in the city of Milwaukee opened my eyes to several lessons in good design, development and planning. The city of Milwaukee Department of City Development has made great strides in the past decade in terms of infill, good urban design and inner city redevelopment. I was in Milwaukee mainly to focus on the Highland Gardens and Highland Homes project, a redevelopment of two aging and, in typical fashion of 1960s public housing, quite dreadful towers and rowhomes in to a new urbanism neighborhood of single-family homes and elderly/disabled public housing. A case…