Cities

When a law partner poked his head into my office to give me the breaking news about Patrick Cannon, Charlotte’s newly-indicted mayor, my head told me that I should feel some degree of outrage, but my heart only felt sadness.

Like all of us, I watched the news unfold to learn what seemed to be…

Several years ago a Guilford County Commissioner told me, chuckling, that he had just heard Jim Melvin, Greensboro’s former mayor, defend some of his ideas for Greensboro’s downtown improvements by saying this: “I don’t want to die in a mediocre city.”

The sentiment resonates.

Last week WordPress sent me my blog statistics for 2013.  Among…

I live in a city that’s pretty screwed up. In many ways. But last month a cavalry rode into town with sabers drawn and bugle blaring, and our salvation may be at hand.

In land use planning there is no official category termed “screwed up city” but it fits.

I grew up – and returned…

            When I traveled through Europe by train 30 years ago I marveled at how cities seemed to stop and start at defined points on the broad landscape, in stark contrast to American cities that bleed forever into the rural (or at least “non-urban”) periphery.

             Thirty years later I marvel again as I travel by car…

When it comes to the numerous principles of New Urbanism I wander variously between McCauley Culkin’s “Yeesssss!!!!!” and Jerry Seinfeld’s “Yeah, yeah, yada yada yada.” But after a few days of exploring Italian villages I’ve developed a firmer conviction that a community is not truly a community unless it has a public place where people…