[ People think New York and they think Manhattan first, or maybe the finer precincts of Brooklyn. But it's an amazingly diverse city. Jefferson Mao grew up in Flushing, Queens, and writes a blog dedicated to that extremely diverse and interesting neighborhood. It's called Flushing Exceptionalism and you ought to give it a look. In this piece reprinted from that blog, he talks about entrepreneurship and the life conditions of the immigrant - Aaron. ] I was there for the entirety of the One Dollar Bus Era in Flushing. It was on a Sunday when … [Read more...]
Chicago As a Global City
This article is part of the State of Chicago series. At this point in my series I'm looking at a couple of my frames on Chicago's problems that are not commonly known or held. The first was Chicago's lack of a calling card industry. I'm now looking at Chicago's weakness as a global city and the excessive focus civic leadership has put on being a global city at the expense of everything else. (I will not be further reviewing well-known and uncontroversial problems such as the fiscal mess). Ranking Chicago as a Global City Last week I … [Read more...]
The Software of Placemaking
Using the tech metaphors so common now, we have tended to focus on the “hardware” of place, the land, bricks and mortar. But maybe it is time to think more in terms of the “software”, of how we program and run places day to day. There are two masters who have done this with real estate, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, and they have both been at this with single properties for more than 20 years. One is Dan Biederman of the Bryant Park Corporation, who has made that Midtown Manhattan space one of the world’s most densely used … [Read more...]
The Cost of Congestion, The Value of Transit
Last week the Texas Transportation Institute released the 2011 edition of its benchmark Urban Mobility Report. It is packed full of useful statistics about roadway networks, congestion, and public transit, though is not without its critics (see below). I'd like to highlight some of the more interesting findings out of this. The Value of Transit One of the values TTI estimates is the number of additional hours of delay each peak hour commuter would incur annual if public transportation were discontinued. In effect, this is one key benefit to … [Read more...]
Economic Development Strategies, Done Right
I met a few weeks back with a group of people trying to figure out strategies for developing the life sciences industry in Indiana. One of the ideas that came out was getting a better understanding of what has worked well in the past or elsewhere in different spaces, and one of the key ideas was understanding how and why the Indianapolis sports strategy was so successful. As a bit of a history lesson, back in the 1970's the city of Indianapolis decided that it wanted to try to make sports, specifically amateur sports at the time, a pillar of … [Read more...]