The Daily Report » Commentary

As America’s baby boomers grow older and economic woes shift the elderly from suburbs to center city, developers capitalize on the demographics as seen in Chicago, where billions of dollars are being spent to transform the Windy City into the next Boca Raton.

(more)

With such a strong presence as a minority group, why don’t more Asian Americans turn up for elections? Asian Americans’ small participation in the political arena can be seen as stemming from their cultural backgrounds. Jennifer Kim reports.

(more)

For Central Alabama Fair Housing Center’s (CAFHC) panel discussion on housing segregation, they produced the correct lineup: Rev. Thomas Jordan, a progeny of Montgomery’s civil rights era, and pastor of the Lilly Baptist Church that hosted the event; Brad Moody, an Auburn University professor who specializes in southern politics; David Barley, a local realtor; city councilwoman Martha Roby – a rare city delegate who didn’t seem confused about who benefited from city growth projects and who didn’t – and the grand architect himself, Ken Groves, head of the city’s Department of Planning and Development. The question was simple: Is residential segregation having a negative impact on Montgomery?

(more)

In an age when facts don’t matter, how do cities build the consensus to make big plans? In a public sphere heavily influenced by talk radio and other media outlets, such as local blogs, where there is no clear line between fact and opinion, where outright falsehoods are presented as legitimate opinions, the billons of dollars in investment in Milwaukee’s Deep Tunnel are now deemed a massive waste. 

(more)

It’s election day in Philadelphia. And Diana Lind is not voting. Read on to find out why. 

(more)

Expectations are a tricky thing to manage, since they are both internal and external, based on solid design and a large does of guesswork. Heightened by the press and built at a frenzied pace, expectations for sports teams are also rooted in deep team loyalty, which itself comes from the host city’s sense of the place. So what do expectations for the Colorado Rockies and Tucson’s Civano town center have in common?

(more)

The average American sees several thousands of advertisements each day—the most commonly accepted estimate is 3,000.  It is no secret in our society that a large chunk of advertising and marketing efforts are directed at children ... Whether or not you think that advertising’s influence on young minds is positive or negative, no one can deny the fact that this massive onslaught of commercialism has some sort of effect, developmentally, on children.  And, since these children will, in a generation or so, be reshaping our cities, how might these developmental changes effect the urban environment?  Perhaps some clues are already rising to the surface.

(more)

The newswire is flooded with memorials today—odes to a man who gave his life to racial harmony. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered on this day 40 years ago. As journalists, writers and broadcasters compare his legacy to the progress of race relations in America, there are still many barriers, both physical and subconscious, that separate cultural communities in cities. 

(more)

Hey buddy, being old doesn’t make it classic.  The same is true for architecture, though here I substitute historic for classic.  A recent article in The Economist troubles me in a similar way. 

(more)

The French city of Lyons is being reproduced on the outskirts of Dubai, presumably for the value of Lyons’ “cultural cachet.” Can something as ephemeral and elusive as the “sense of place” of Lyons be copied and pasted onto a desert thousands of miles from the original?  Might it be possible that, in a world run by adults raised in virtual copies of real-world places refashioned, essentially, as brands, the wholesale reproduction of city neighborhoods could become commonplace around the world?

(more)