“For too long, federal policy has actually encouraged sprawl and congestion and pollution, rather than quality public transportation and smart sustainable development.” President Obama

Obama Administration Urban Policy

From Washington Post | President Pitches Plan to Revive America’s Cities

President Obama, the first urban president since John F. Kennedy, is putting a new federal emphasis on revitalizing America’s cities with a coordinated effort that involves infusions of stimulus funding and getting multiple agencies to work together to improve schools, housing and neighborhoods.

The approach is winning applause from local officials and urban thinkers, who credit the administration for quietly beginning to put in place the most ambitious new policy for the nation’s urban areas since the Great Society programs of the 1960s. But the plan involves fundamental changes in the way federal agencies dole out assistance to urban areas, making its ultimate success uncertain.

“This is way more than an ocean liner trying to change direction,” said Angela Glover Blackwell, founder of PolicyLink, an advocacy organization that has consulted closely with the Obama administration. “This is glacial.”

Peniel E. Joseph, a Tufts University historian, said it appears that Obama is trying to reverse a trend in which urban issues slipped down the national agenda. Obama’s stimulus plan included at least $20 billion in funding for urban programs, outside of education.

“The stimulus certainly put billions into urban areas, but we are still going to have to see over the course of his administration what this adds up to,” Joseph said. “Right now we just don’t know.”

Obama has lamented the historic failures of federal efforts to rejuvenate urban areas, noting in July at a White House urban policy roundtable, “For too long, federal policy has actually encouraged sprawl and congestion and pollution, rather than quality public transportation and smart sustainable development.”

In the same way that federal highway spending encouraged sprawl, the Obama administration says more concentrated development can lead to more job opportunities for residents and neighborhoods that are both environmentally friendly and economically viable.

To coordinate his initiatives, Obama created the position of urban “czar” and in March named Adolfo Carrion Jr., the former Bronx borough president, to direct his new White House Office of Urban Affairs.

“This is not your father’s White House,” Carrion said in an interview. “This is a new way of looking at the new city-metro reality.”

Over the past two months, Carrion and other top administration officials — from agencies as diverse as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency– have visited cities to observe innovative development schemes that fit the model.

In Kansas City, federal stimulus funds have galvanized a project called the Green Impact Zone, led by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), the city’s former mayor. About $200 million in mostly federal money will be invested in the project, which aims to transform an economically depressed 150-square-block area of the city known as “East of Troost Avenue.” With vacant homes, high crime and unemployment rates approaching 50 percent, about half of its residents live in deep poverty.

The project involves a coordinated rush of federal money. Stimulus funds will be used to weatherize the 2,500 homes in the community. Block grants from the Department of Energy will be used to hire area residents and train them to do energy audits. Meanwhile, the local power company will build a “smart grid” in the area, using $25 million in stimulus money and $25 million of their own. More than $30 million, mostly from the Department of Transportation, will be used to build a 13-mile rapid transit line through the community to downtown that will feature solar-powered stations and buses that run on bio-diesel fuel. There also will be job training in environmental clean up and community policing funded by various agencies.

Full | President Obama Pitches Plan to Revive America’s Cities

Cities are _____. Cities are organic. They are like plants. Cities are like ecosystem. Cities are jungles. Cities are like bacterial colonies. Cities are fortresses against the perils of nature. Cities are machines, engines of culture and progress. Cities are like libraries, or like a living museum.  Cities are amusement parks, and on and on. The ability to describe a city, or some aspect of it, really knows no boundary.

A recent comparison of the city I found is to that of a battlesuit (as if we really need any war references to frame the development of our cities). More to my liking is this study conducted by Mark Changizi, a neurobiology expert and assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer, which suggests cities are organized like human brains.

Ever since I started my formal urban planning education way back in 2004, I’ve encountered as many metaphors and similes to describe cities as there are, well, cities. This way of understanding these places of uncertainty – strange, I’m sure coming from an architect/planner – allows us to draw associations from other systems and entities to perhaps consider how our cities may be improved in ways that better suit our needs and desires.  It is the uncertainty inherent in our cities that allows for such a broad comparison of their constituent parts, as well as their totality.

The power to visualize the city as something that it is not, but exhibits some likeness to a characteristic or process of an unrelated system or entity is an essential tool in testing ideas, new or old, for how we organize, create, use, maintain, regenerate, and ultimately define our built environment. This act of defining becomes even more complex considering that cities are already the result of layers upon layers of previous experimentation, some successful and others less so.

Framing our cities in this way, how are we to proceed? Well, there are certainly as many strategies for that as there are metaphors of the city, and it’s not as simple as starting over as the modernists would have had us believe.

There’s a Johnny Cash song (written by Wayne Kemp) that offers a compelling metaphor for cities, which I’ve written about before, here. In One Piece at a Time (1976), Cash describes a Cadillac built from parts slowly acquired over many years working in the factory. As the car’s design changed over the course of those years (1949 to 1973), so too did the corresponding components that gave the car its overall form. As a result, Cash’s Cadillac was a hybrid of all those disparate components, modified and assembled into a unique identity.

Cities are bit different though, and they can never be fully described by any one metaphor or simile. Instead, we need all of them. Like Cash’s Cadillac, cities can be conceptualized by many comparisons that are modified, tested, and assembled over time. Cities like this will not look exactly like the utopian dream machines on the drawing boards, but more like the ever-adapting psychobilly assemblages they really are.

So, what different, cobbled-together ways is your city like?