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An online marketing consultant, an avid reader of 400 + books a year. Professional reader, reviewer, and blogger. Enjoy ARCs and new releases.
Where We Want to Live: Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities
Urban Atlanta designer, Ryan Gravel delivers a challenge to Americans WHERE WE WANT TO LIVE, Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities ---his extraordinary vision to create a healthier and more satisfying way of life, by connecting neighborhoods and communities. We all have to embrace the change, work together and do our part—we can make a difference.
As Americans, we are disgusted at the metropolis sprawled before us, with communities moving further out in order to find affordable housing. Therefore, creating even more madness on the overcrowded highways. People are relying more and more on the automobiles to get around.
By taking action through businesses, governments, nonprofits, citizen campaigns, grassroots leaders and developers working together—will help create a more sustainable healthy, and equitable way of life for everyone.
WHERE YOU WANT TO LIVE will empower you and inspire to join the plan for changing decades of thinking, the old school way--an environment organized primarily around cars instead of people. We cannot sit back and expect someone else to shape the world on our behalf. Take action in the face of dramatic regional and cultural change, and build communities that we actually want to live in. To start the process, we all have to define what we want and start working together.
From traffic, pollution, and sprawl—mistakes of the past. Think resilient, connected, mobile, healthy, sustainable, economically thriving, and diverse—talking points. Politics of change. Four positions:
Start with small projects from political structure, stop the sprawl, redirect growth. Revitalizing urban neighborhoods and historic Downtown, and refashioning the vast commercial strips of outlying areas into vibrant transit-centered corridors. A means to start a conversation, take action, and help shape a new and better direction. Experimenting with new ideas, cultivating a political structure for change, stopping sprawl, and shift to more sustainable growth strategies, we can build a better future for everyone.
Gravel's vision for Atlanta has moved into a wide-ranging urban regeneration projects being expanded across the country. It takes ordinary people like all of us and the force of a shared momentum. Everyone has to share in the role for infrastructure, and can help shape and advance this cycle of change.
Similar projects are in the works, from the Los Angeles River Revitalization and the Buffalo Bayou in Houston to the Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis and the Underline in Miami. In Where We Want to Live, Gravel presents an exciting blueprint for revitalizing cities to make them places where we truly want to live.
If you have listened to the author’s videos or heard him speak previously, his creative vision came from Paris in 1995. He addresses the beginning, how it took shape and his journey in his insightful book. His interest was to figure out how he could work within the complexities to improve cities like his own hometown of Atlanta. The Beltline was conceived as his graduate thesis. A way to reinvigorate Atlanta’s in-town communities with new development and improved transit mobility. A need for urban regeneration.
Changing the way people think. The process. Discovering a new kind of infrastructure for our lives.
From our ancestors, our history, the rail service, land growth, a growing nation, and the twentieth century. Explosive growth. Urban examination. Suburban growth, traffic congestion, and the ecological consequences of unmitigated sprawl…real change in the way we build our city requires a significant shift in the attitude of a region that has for too long prioritized the automobile as the primary tool for urban expansion.
People are fed up with traffic and sprawl, and rediscovering a new and improved way to live work and play. An intimate relationship between infrastructure and our way of life.
Gravel’s plan connects 40 diverse Atlanta neighborhoods (awesome) to city schools, shopping districts, and public parks, and has already seen a huge payoff in real estate development and local business revenue.
I found the history fascinating and enjoyed catching up with familiar places, and seeing all the work which has been completed thus far. Before I left Atlanta, Ryan was already active with the project- was so excited with the upcoming plans to connect Atlanta.
Nicely done!
On a personal note:
Having lived in Atlanta (Midtown, Buckhead, Vinings) from 1994-2006, before relocating to South Florida, I felt a part of the movement in a big way--A member of ULI (Urban Land Institute), NAIOP, the media business -Associate Publisher Atlanta's Black's Guide, Atlanta's B to B Magazine, Publisher of Primedia's Atlanta New Home Data Book, an Atlanta based commercial real estate company, and economic development for N Fulton Chamber of Commerce. The traffic was always a nightmare (especially I-285); a great need for connectivity--and I lived and worked inside the perimeter. Was excited when they started converting the railroad to cycling trails, which I rode every weekend as an avid cycler from Georgia to Alabama.
I chose to move to South Florida in 2006 (West Palm Beach), where I still reside-- a city gal in urban downtown West Palm Beach along the waterfront. I live in an area with a walking score of 94 of 100, (which is paradise) ....with easy access to CityPlace and Clematis (two major entertainment centers).
When you live downtown, there is not ample parking, so you park your car (pay) for monthly parking blocks away. This encourages you to walk or cycle. I tested this and found I was only driving my car a few times a month. Last week I sold my SUV. The first time being without a car since the age of sixteen. It is liberating.
I work from my home office and walk everywhere. There is no need to drive. I joined a car share program in the event I need a car (you can rent by the day or the hour). I cycle a few times a week, plus we also have trolleys, TriRail, SkyBike, plus we are excited about the All Aboard Florida (passenger train travel, connecting Orlando, West Palm Beach, and Miami), to be completed next year (within walking distance). I am looking forward to the new freedom without parking fees, car maintenance, fuel, and car insurance, plus useless time on the road and staying fit.
Being a baby boomer (along with a big part of the population), approaching retirement with less income, this group is looking for more affordable housing and walkable cities. The waiting lists are up to five years long in most Florida downtown cities, or they are so long, they are closed and not accepting new applications. Active seniors want to move south for warmer year round climate. There is a great need for urban low income housing and independent senior living, locations in walkable cities—in addition to the younger generations. They all have to work together, as Ryan mentions in his plans. Better design, more biking paths, trees and curb appeal. People want to feel safe when walking.
The obvious answer is that cities need to provide the sort of environment that these people want. Live, work, and play. Especially millennials, vastly favor communities with street life, the pedestrian culture that can only come from walkability.
Other reading: The economist Christopher Leinberger compares the experience of today’s young professionals with the previous generation. He notes that most 50-year-olds grew up watching The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, and Happy Days, shows that idealized the late-mid-20th-century suburban standard of low-slung houses on leafy lots, surrounded by more of the same.
The millennials in contrast, grew up watching Seinfeld, Friends, and, eventually, Sex and the City. They matured in a mass culture—of which TV was only one part—that has predisposed them to look favorably upon cities, indeed, to aspire to live in them. This group represent the biggest population bubble in fifty years. They choose to live in urban areas and only then do they look for a job. Meanwhile, the generation raised on Friends is not the only major cohort looking for new places to live.
There’s a larger one: the millennials’ parents, the front-end boomers. They are citizens that every city wants—significant personal savings, no schoolkids. Empty nesters want walkability: The surburban houses are too large, with empty rooms to be heated, cooled and cleaned, with unused yard maintenance. Suburban houses can be socially isolating, especially as aging eyes and slower reflexes make driving everywhere less comfortable.
Whether you want Urban Downtown living or the suburbs, we all want to create a healthier and more satisfying way of life, by connecting neighborhoods and communities.
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