Even Burglar's Prefer the City

Think about our built environment and how much of it is designed around safety and security. The gated communities, the numbers on top of office buildings, the entrances and exits, garages and elevators. eyes on the street.

Now imagine seeing our daily landscape through the eyes of someone that wanted to break into our homes and our offices. Suddenly architecture takes on a whole new dimension. One that my guest Geoff Manaugh conveys in his new book A Burglar's Guide to the City.

My conversation with Geoff Manaugh:

The Naked City

While those that love cities often claim to love their authenticity,  we still want them to have the latest trendy cafe, boutiques, and galleries that are often at odds with the very authenticity we claim to want.  How do we reconcile this desire for convenience and modernity with diversity, quirkiness and and a genuine urban landscape? This is what Sharon Zukin shows us in Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places.   She looks at what gives neighborhoods a sense of place, but also why that very sense often prices them out of the market for all but the elite. How does authenticity become exclusivity?

My conversation with Sharon Zukin:

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Pittsburgh vs. Detroit, by way of Cleveland

Just returned from Cleveland and saw a city totally mired in what Richard Florida calls "the great reset."  A city of downtown urban promise surrounded by the decay, unemployment and foreclosers of the current economic crisis.  It's interesting to wonder if Cleveland will go the way of Pittsburgh and continue to re energize, or will it go the way of Detroit.  

John Craig, a former editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette nails it in his recent Washington Post article.  Money quote:

Particularly challenging is the state of affairs in the urban core, where population stood at slightly more than 900,000 in 2006, down from a 1950 high of 1.6 million. There’s a critical difference here between the two cities. Even though it has only a third of Detroit’s population, Pittsburgh has more people working in it every day — 298,429 to 241,627. It also has a 1 percent county sales tax that serves as a user fee for regional entertainment and cultural institutions. Thus it’s able to offer area residents more urban amenities and job opportunities than Detroit.

For all its traumas, Pittsburgh retains an urban/suburban/rural coherence. That, coupled with striking architecture and a beautiful natural setting, goes a long way toward explaining why it consistently gets better press than it might deserve, and why, after you examine the region’s economic, demographic, environmental, health and local government measures, you refrain from blurting out, “Why, they’ve been treading water for years!” Which is, in any case, better than sinking.