The "livable city," the "creative city," and more recently the "pop-up city" have become pervasive monikers that identify a new type of urbanism that has sprung up globally, produced and managed by ...the business improvement district and known colloquially by its acronym, BID. With this case study, Susanna F. Schaller draws on more than fifteen years of research to present a direct, focused engagement with both the planning history that shaped Washington, D.C.'s landscape and the intricacies of everyday life, politics, and planning practice as they relate to BIDs. Schaller offers a critical unpacking of the BID ethos, which draws on the language of economic liberalism (individual choice, civic engagement, localism, and grassroots development), to portray itself as color blind, democratic, and equitable.
Schaller reveals the contradictions embedded in the BID model. For the last thirty years, BID advocates have engaged in effective and persuasive storytelling; as a result, many policy makers and planners perpetuate the BID narrative without examining the institution and the inequities it has wrought. Schaller sheds light on these oversights, thus fostering a critical discussion of BIDs and their collective influence on future urban landscapes.
Main Street Merrifield, Andy; Fullilove, Mindy Thompson
10/2020
eBook
Traverses the central thoroughfares of our cities to
uncover the ways they bring together our communities
How do Main Streets contribute to our mental health? This
intriguing question took social ...psychiatrist Mindy Thompson
Fullilove on an 11-year search through 178 cities in 14 countries.
As Andy Merrifield notes in the foreword, "Mindy has drifted
through a lot of Main Streets, walked them, observed, talked to
people, ordinary people as well as professional
practitioners.
While she got to pace many miles of New York's Broadway, eat
French patisseries as a flâneuse in Gay Paree, sip çay in Istanbul,
and chill in Kyoto's dazzling Zen temples, her real concern is Main
Street, USA, the more modest main stems of provincial America."
From these visits Fullilove has discerned the larger architecture
of Main Streets. She observes the ways that Main Streets are shaped
for a vast array of social gatherings and processes, how they are a
marker for
the integrity of civilization-and the marks aren't always good.
She also looks at Main Streets as "an allée, a way that is part
drama and part quotidian. While passing through, we get to look at
one another, to sing, to recognize what we are, have been, might
be." Her conclusion, that Main Streets are essential for gathering
people and sharing information, emphasizes that tending our
oft-neglected civic and commercial centers is a task worthy of us
all.
Urban areas of the central activities with mixed land use are crucial for the development of city center, even in small cities. In the last decades or two the attention is drawn on the retail and ...service activities that are usually located outside of cities near main roads. Municipalities had already detected this problem, but they are not implementing any of the measures (Rebernik, 2010). The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the central activities in small cities in Slovenia are located in freestanding buildings, which is most appropriate in terms of forming the open public space in the city center. In this research we compared ten central activities (Vrišer, 1988, 1990, Kokole, 1971) in 34 small cities. We selected only those small cities (Prosen et al, 2008) which have among other activities a county court. The results showed the differences and commonalities of the central activities in selected small cities according to the indicators. Litija, Domžale and Sevnica are small cities, where activities that could articulate open public space are located in the larger building complexes. The phenomenon is similar to a modern machine, where action in it and indirectly the insight into the functioning of the society is invisible to the observer (Kos, 2008). We found out that in these tree cities the central activities are not forming the open public spaces in front of the public buildings (Vertelj Nared, 2014). The result is problematic image of the city and changed forces of the city life.
Picture your downtown vacant, boarded up, while the malls surrounding your city are thriving. What would you do? In 1974 the politicians, merchants, community leaders, and business and property ...owners, of Ithaca, New York, joined together to transform main street into a pedestrian mall. Cornell University began an Industrial Research Park to keep and attract jobs. Developers began renovating run-down housing. City Planners crafted a long-range plan utilizing State legislation permitting a Business Improvement District (BID), with taxing authority to raise up to 20 percent of the City tax rate focused on downtown redevelopment. Shaping a City is the behind-the-scenes story of one developer’s involvement, from first buying and renovating small houses, gradually expanding his thinking and projects to include a recognition of the interdependence of the entire city—jobs, infrastructure, retail, housing, industry, taxation, banking and City Planning. It is the story of how he, along with other local developers transformed a quiet, economically challenged upstate New York town into one that is recognized nationally as among the best small cities in the country. The lessons and principles of personal relationships, cooperation and collaboration, the importance of density, and the power of a Business Improvement District to catalyze change, are ones you can take home for the development and revitalization of your city.
New Urbanism Dirksmeier, Peter, Dr; Helbrecht, Ilse, Prof Dr
2012, 20160513, 2016-05-13, 2016-05-11, 2012-04-01, 20120101
eBook
Bringing together a range of leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this edited collection examines innovative urban redevelopment projects around Europe and North America which are at ...the forefront of this new urbanism and which are here termed 'New Downtowns'. It introduces this term and concept and asks key questions about the futures of cities, such as how cities might achieve a sustained urbanity, what strategies might be deployed to do so, and how market forces might be co-opted for collective interests?.
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