Reclaiming American Cities: The Struggle for People, Place, and Nature since 1900

Part III: The (More) Humane Decades, 1990-Present

PA R T I I I The (More) Humane Decades, 1990–Present “This page intentionally left blank” “How Ordinary Citizens Are Restoring Our Great American Cities”—the apt­ subtitle of Harry Wiland and Dale Bell’s book (and popular PBS series) Edens Lost & Found—eloquently attests that “humane urbanism” is thriving at many scales in such large cities as Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Proactive city mayors like Richard M. Daley (Chicago), Michael R. Bloomberg (New York), Anthony A. Williams (Washington, DC), and Antonio Villaraigosa (Los Angeles) have ­ redefined the role of municipal governance. Where local governments once marched in lockstep with the drumbeat of federal, state, and corporate priorities, they now also respond to goals defined by community groups and NGOs on behalf of “ordinary communities,” not just “downtown.” For instance, PlaNYC: A Greener, Greater New York, the sustainability blueprint of Mayor Bloomberg, lists dozens of neighborhood-scale actions relating to affordable housing, parks, tree-planting, public transportation, and brownfield clean-up. In Small, Gritty, and Green,1 Catherine Tumber discusses how small cities like Holyoke (Massachusetts), Muncie (Indiana), or Toledo (Ohio)—as well as formerly large industrial cities like Detroit and Cleveland—are seeking to redefine themselves as centers of innovation and “low carbon” sustainability. Some are experimenting with new strategies for “smart decline,” a plan to re-concentrate homes, businesses—and the public services catering to them—in viable neighborhoods while converting abandoned lots to community gardens and related activities.2 There is no panacea: many such cities today face hobbling unemployment, housing foreclosures and abandonment, drug and alcohol abuse, and other economic and social afflictions. But programs like Holyoke’s Nuestras Raices (community farming and business incubation), New Haven’s Urban Resources Initiative (regreening of vacant lots), and the Marvin Gaye Greenway in Washington, DC (each summarized in chapter 10) offer inspiring glimpses of homegrown inventiveness in small cities. The four chapters of “The (More) Humane Decades,” the third and final part of this book, explore the terrain of contemporary humane urbanism from several perspectives . Beginning in the 1990s, the urban design professions sought to respond to the last century’s sorry legacies through the Smart Growth movement and its cousin New Urbanism. Those initiatives have helped to broaden the geographic and functional scope of urban improvement beyond the preoccupation with downtowns, automobiles, and the single-use zoning of the past century. In particular, they have promoted more flexible regulations to encourage mixed-use development providing a range of housing types and costs, proximity of residential and commercial activities, and reduced dependence on cars through public transit, bikeways, and sidewalks. 156 Part III Smart Growth and New Urbanism have thus helped to improve the quality of particular urban projects, such as the reuse of Stapleton Airport in Denver or the planned Atlanta BeltLine (I discuss both in chapter 7). But they have little or no traction across the vast swathes of metropolitan America that are already built and not targets of major investment anytime soon—what Joel Kotkin has termed “­midopolis.”3 Even those areas of unassuming older neighborhoods, highway strip development, and decaying public facilities have begun to benefit from an array of new legal and financial tools—largely created or reinvigorated during the 1990s— which facilitate humane urbanism at various scales. Some of these “acronymic”­ devices summarized in the balance of chapter 7, “Replanting Urbanism in the 1990s: A Garden of Acronyms,” include affordable housing strategies, the American with Disabilities Act, green buildings, rail trails, urban water resource management, endangered species, and climate change adaptation. The final three chapters explore how these and other new strategies are helping to promote humane urbanism in varied metropolitan settings across the country. Chapter 8, “New Age ‘Central Parks’: Two Grand Slams and a Single,” heralds the synergy of people, place, and nature achieved in Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s High Line, in contrast with Boston’s disappointing Rose Fitzgerald ­ Kennedy Greenway—a throwback to the era when parks were promised as bait to gain public support for urban highways (a strategy that failed with New York’s Westway). Chapter 9, “Reclaiming Urban Waterways: One River at a Time” compares strategies for rehabilitating urban streams and watersheds in the metropolitan areas of Boston, Washington, DC, Houston, and Los Angeles. Despite differences in physical geography, land use, politics, and demography, such initiatives depend on publicprivate collaboration as catalyzed by nongovernmental watershed organizations and local...