Cities Back From The Edge

Cities: Back From the Edge by Roberta Brandes Gratz and Norman Mintz

ISBN 0471361240 Gratz and Mintz set out to establish guidelines and tips for city leaders, community activists, businesspeople, and regular citizens who seek to improve the status of their communities. They carefully outline what works, what does not work and why.

I just started reading this book today. It talks about what factors contribute to vibrant downtowns. A lot of it is common sense. Good citizens make good cities. When city planners rely on outside developers or retailers to rejuvenate downtowns, their success is often superficial at best. You get better results when local people create innovative solutions to civic problems. The book also emphasizes the importance of people having a stake in the downtown's success and a willingness to invest energy and to take risks to make things better. Again, common sense.

Be careful focusing too much on downtown. The city of Portland, OR (where this fair Wiki is hosted, or thereabouts) has a beautiful, thriving downtown. Lots of shopping, restaurants, clubs, parks, art dealers, concert halls, etc. Also highly gentrified; many neighborhoods (such as NW 23rd) that once were middle-class communities are now YuppiePlaygrounds?. Which is good if you are a yuppie (as I have been accused of being); not so good if you are someone on a fixed income who is forced to move because you no longer can afford the taxes/rent that have gone up due to RichYuppie?s moving into your neighborhood.

Urban renewal comes at another price, too. While the City of Portland has spent oodles of taxpayer $$$ making certain neighborhoods SafeForStarbucks?; other neighborhoods in the city get attention from only one city department--the police bureau. Many neighborhoods in SE still have heavily rutted gravel roads; as for these folks the city has taken the position that if the locals want it paved, they need to pay for it. But lots of money is available for urban renewal in neighborhoods in which the well-connected dwell (not to mention harebrained schemes like tearing down/moving I-5, because it blocks the view from downtown, or covering I-405 to reclaim a few extra city blocks in a trendy neighborhood...)--ScottJohnson

The ideas in the book resonated with debates on open/free software vs. proprietary software that I've been reading lately. I have no intristic problems with money-making institutions, but I still feel this idealistic goal that greater things come from community. As I use more free/open source software, the benefits of community impress me, while the supposed advantages of the proprietary model seem shallow and fragile. It's just my experience.

I have also been learning a lot more about RichardStallman lately. When you read his interviews and speeches, you can certainly understand why he's controversial, but he impresses me as one of the most thoughtful, principled men of our era.

Sort of rambling here, but I wonder if other folks have though about the community vs. institution dichotomies in other non-software contexts. -- SteveHowell

See AnAnarchistFaq. Anarchism concerns itself with the community vs. institutions dichotomy. It is vehemently against institutions because of their authoritarian character. (Authoritarianism is a BadThing to anarchists.) There is the further problem of money and profit as extremely poor indicators of human needs and desirability. (That is, just because it's profitable to pollute doesn't mean anyone should.) And of course the dehumanizing and disenfranchising effects of concerning oneself solely with profit. The FSF philosophy page deals a little with this last issue in the 'Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator' essay at http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/motivation.html. AnAnarchistFaq deals with all of these issues in detail. -- RichardKulisz

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