We saw hundreds of programs to redevelop the central city, the neighborhoods, in the past.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Cities may now bulldoze private citizens' homes, farms and small businesses to make way for shopping malls or other developments.
There's been a big spur in downtown development with new business, restaurants and a lot of loft buying. The buses run, and there's a subway that runs through downtown.
It would be great to take one city street and turn it into a pedestrian corridor and see what kind of effect it has on the businesses in that area - It's the future I think.
It's really kind of hard to be a suburb of nothing. If you don't have a downtown, you really don't have anything. It's hard to build a community around parking lots and subdivisions.
Look at the commercial and industrial development that is going on along the 101. A lot of the infrastructure - the sewer lines and drainage that make development possible - was put in during the freeway construction.
The suburb in the 1950s was a bedroom community. The father worked in the city, and the mother stayed home. Now people live and work in the suburbs, and businesses have grown up or moved from cities to certain pockets of what was once the suburbs and created these places that are like cities.
In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.
The negotiation of city space has been made more difficult with the idea that redevelopment is an improvement for some vague future - but it's never like that, is it? Once you get there, for economic reasons you have to generate the next project - so you're immediately starting to dig up something else, and so it goes on.
There's the downtown area of Tupelo. Did you see the skyscrapers? Two stories.
Besides infrastructure, there is a huge opportunity in housing and urbanisation of cities - not only building new ones, but also renewing the infrastructure of old cities to make them more livable. This provides tremendous scope for large investments to fuel growth.
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