The Death and Life of Great American Cities

According to Adam Baacke, Lowell’s assistant city manager for planning and development, achieving this transformation was essentially a three-step process that could perhaps be best described as politics, permitting, and pathfinding. Politics refers to changing attitudes (and people) on the city council, where most members shunned downtown housing

Proponents of parks, like the advocates of urban planning, struggled to articulate a rationale for what was a rather novel political idea in the laissez-faire era of politics in the United States. Developing parks required all the tactics we currently use in our modern urban planning apparatus: the condemnation and taking of private property for pu

If the city didn’t provide parks, the reformers understood, that was a sign that society didn’t care; the people who lived in the slums might not verbalize that concept, but they would feel it even if they didn’t put it into words; and therefore the lack of parks could only increase their bitterness toward society.

One final point must be discussed. The magic of a great city comes from the enormous specialization of human effort there. Only a city such as New York can support a restaurant where you can eat chocolate-covered ants, or buy three-hundred-year-old books of poems, or find a Caribbean steel band playing with American folk singers. By comparison, a c