Disney World on the Hudson (Jeremiah Moss, NYTimes OpEd)

"The High Line has become a tourist-clogged catwalk and a catalyst for some of the most rapid gentrification in the city’s history."

Within the last year I'd say that the High-Line has certainly become a victim of its own success. I visited it for the second time this past May - while the work itself is beautiful, the experience was aweful. Unlike a typical park there's relatively limited access and the "public" space itself is extremely narrow in parts - which means you can consistently find yourself trudging along single file, as if you were waiting in line for a roller coaster.

I wouldn't limit the "Disney World" comment to the High Line, the Meatpacking District or Chelsea. Almost all of Manhattan has a strange kind of unreality to it. Greenwich Village looks more like a Hollywood set than an actual place where people live. It's been decades since SoHo housed any real starving artists. The Upper East Side has become a half-occupied retirement community for the World's 1%. In many ways New York is becoming a  kind of luxury show-room for the world - more of a place where interesting things are displayed and consumed than a center of innovation.

A Lifeline from the World (Richard Longworth)

"It's easy --and wrong -- to say that the people in these towns are globalization's leftovers, men and women who can't cut it in this new economy, refugees happily hiding from the rest of the world, with no interest in that world and nothing to say about it. Many do indeed feel like castaways, but they long for more links with a world that has passed them by.

...But what struck me most in the two days of conversations was the almost desperate thirst in the state's isolated small towns for some link to the wider world, for the need to tap into minds and thinking beyond the town limits, if only to feel that they haven't been totally exiled from life..."

The Story of Rust Belt Chic (Richey Pilparinen via Aaron Renn)

"Think of this incident between two individuals–or more exactly, between two realities: the famed and fameless, the make-up’d and cosmetically starved, the prosperous and struggled–as a microcosm for regional relations, with the Rust Belt left to linger in a lack of illusions for decades.

But when you have a constant pound of reality bearing down on a people, the culture tends to mold around what’s real. Said Coco Chanel:

“Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity”.

And if you can say one thing about the Rust Belt–it’s that it’s authentic."

Where the Chicago Accent Comes from and How Politics is Changing it (Chicago Mag)

"In a lengthy PowerPoint presentation, Labov shows how the Erie Canal moved the New England settlement stream west along the Great Lakes (separate settlement streams moved southwest from Pennsylvania and west from the coastal South). So, in some part, momentum carried an entirely separate linguistic culture along that narrow band."

World of Chicago (NBC 5)

'Father of carbon trading' predicts growth in clean-tech startups (Crain's)

"Crain's met with Mr. Sandor recently to learn more about why he's betting the Midwest -- and Chicago in particular -- will grow to become the next Silicon Valley of clean technology and other green businesses."

Top Architectural Record award for Guangzhou Opera House? Really? (Archinect)

"Promoting clearly flawed design as the “best” we have to offer is demeaning and makes us look ridiculous to people outside the architecture subculture. This is how we lose power in the larger society and become marginalized as a discipline."

The Unprecedented Urban Dynamic in Pennsylvania's Voter ID Law (Atlantic Cities)

"As many as 280,000 voters in Philadelphia may need to get an ID between now and November to have their votes counted."

Mayor Emanuel says Chicago economy is booming (Op-Ed in the Sun-Times)

"We are not riding a national trend; our strategy for economic growth is creating our own trend. Because we are not resting on our strengths but investing in them, companies have the confidence to invest and grow in Chicago."

Wiel Arets named Dean of The Illinois Institute of Technology's College of Architecture (Cityscapes)

"Arets, who was dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam from 1995-2002, will join IIT this fall and will lead an academic program originally shaped by the vision and work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe."

The Creative Class' 10th Birthday (The New Republic)

"At the same time, Stauber says, Florida’s regional determinism overlooks the role that specific decisions and investments have played in making some places thrive. It’s no accident, for one thing, that many of his most “creative” cities are home to public universities. Why assume that new investments might not prop up other places as well?"

Second Nature City - 2009 Masters of Architecture Thesis

Open publication - Free publishing

Nice to find this on the web - it was better than I remember it. Very happy - hope others find it interesting.

Chicago's economy improving faster than other major cities (WBEZ)

According to a new report, Chicago's had the largest decline in unemployment in the last year among the top ten metro areas in the nation. The report comes from Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago professor and one of President Obama's former economic advisors.

A Cluster Grows in Chicago (Richard Longworth)

"There's been a run of good news for Chicago recently which, apart from giving Mayor Rahm Emanuel some happy headlines, tell us something about the nature of global cities, about the shape of this new economy, and about who wins and who loses."