Companies Say Goodbye to the 'Burbs (Wall Street Journal)

"The showcase headquarters of the past, the beautiful suburban campuses—that's a very obsolete model now," said Patrick Phillips, CEO of the Urban Land Institute, a land-use think tank."

Reinventing our economy to inspire a new middle class (Richard Longworth, Chicago Tribune)

"But they're no longer alone. Across the nation and especially in the old industrial cities of the Midwest, those "fundamental structural changes" are undercutting whole civilizations, both black and white. The cause is the same: deindustrialization, the collapse of heavy manufacturing, the disappearance of jobs, skilled and unskilled. And the results are the same: generational unemployment, school dropouts, broken homes, drugs, poverty, bad health."

Entrepreneur-in-Chief: The New Model City (Ramsin Canon)

"Chicago is no longer a political community, it is an economic entity that is in competition with other cities in the region, in the state, across the world. In that mental framework, tax is cost, or price. You raise prices, you drive away your clients. In the case of the neoliberal city, the client is the developer, the investor, the employer. The federal government and the state are not going giving the city any real money; they are not investing in infrastructure, or education, or social welfare in any real way, the way they did up through the late 1970s and 1980s. The name of the game is “growth” through enticement of capital."

Washington: A World Apart (Washington Post)

"Although the wealthiest Americans have always lived in their own islands of privilege, sociologists and demographers say the degree to which today’s professional class resides in a world apart is a departure from earlier generations. People of widely different incomes and professions commonly lived close enough that they mingled at stores, sports arenas and school. In an era in which women had fewer educational and professional opportunities, lawyers married secretaries and doctors married nurses. Now, lawyers and doctors marry each other.

A recent analysis of census data by sociologists Sean Reardon of Stanford and Kendra Bischoff of Cornell highlighted how middle-income neighborhoods have been fading away as more people live in areas that are either poor or affluent."

Are the Suburbs Where the American Dream Goes to Die? (Matthew O'Brien, The Atlantic)

The suburbs didn't quite kill the American Dream, but a particular type did. That's the low-density and racially-polarized suburbs that have defined places like Atlanta. Indeed, as you can see in the chart below from Paul Krugman, there's a noticeable relationship between a metro area's density and its social mobility.

In Climbing the Income Ladder, Location Matters   (David Leonhardt, NY Times)

National Media Sources Finally Write Intelligently about Chicago

The national media continues to focus on the challenges and changes affecting Chicago, but finally we have a couple of examples of more thoughtful, complex reporting about our city.

The Death and Life of Chicago (Ben Austen, NY Times Magazine)

“We’re not like Detroit, cordoning off sections of the city,” Benet Haller, Chicago’s principal adviser for planning and design, told me. “But we are like London or Jakarta, with a hyperdense core — a zone of affluence — and something else beyond.” What the housing crisis has revealed, in stark relief, is a Chicago that already looks increasingly like this vision of a ring city, with the moneyed elite residing within the glow of that jewel-like core and the largely ethnic poor and working-class relegated to the peripheries, the banlieues."

Rahm's Kind of Town (David Von Drehle, Time Magazine Feature)

"Revealing the stripes of a pragmatic, pro-business New Democrat, the mayor has lengthened the school day for Chicago's elementary and high school students, reorganized the city's enormous system of community colleges to emphasize job-skills training and established an infrastructure trust to allow private investment in public-works projects. All of these are popular ideas among some Democratic policy mavns, but no other mayor has taken them so far, so fast."

Growth & Abandonment: Chicago's Population Continues to Shift

Why the Smartest People in the Midwest All Move to Chicago (Edward McClelland, Chicago Mag)

Despite Population Growth, Chicago Still at a Loss (Sun-Times)

The Census estimates came out today. Chicago gained about 10,000 over the last year - which is significant but still half the rate of growth in New York and L.A. Meanwhile, the only two major cities in America to loose population over the last year where Detroit and Cleveland. The trend continues. I suspect that Chicago's far South and West Sides are still loosing population at a steady clip. Most of this, again, is due to African American out-migration (90% of Chicago's population loss during the 2000 - 2010 decade can be attributed to "Black Flight"). I discussed the tragedy of this trend in earlier posts.

If we were to take Detroit as a comparable example to Chicago's South Side (they're very similar in terms of size, demographics and economic history), we might estimate that Chicago lost anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 people from these neighborhoods during 2012 (Detroit lost 12,000). This means that the city had to gain a total of 20k - 25k people in the Central Area, North and Northwest Sides to offset the loss on the South and West Sides. 20k - 25k would put Chicago right in line percentage-wise with the growth rates of New York in L.A., which don't have anything close to the poverty, decay and abandonment of the South and West Sides.

I illustrate this only to reinforce the point that Chicago is now two cities: One post-industrial city that is still in a free fall - becoming more and more impoverished and abandoned every year and another "Global" city that is growing as fast (if not faster) than any city in the country. This would explain why apartment occupancy and rents in the Central area and North Side are as high as they've ever been while the South Side continues to bleed.

Why do so many people think gun violence is getting worse? (Atlantic Cities)

"So why might this be? If gun violence has dramatically declined in America, and many cities are safer today as a result – and plenty of people moving back into them seem to intuitively understand this – why do so many people think gun violence is getting worse?"

The Hidden Geography of America's Surging Suicide Rate (Richard Florida, Atlantic Cities)

"While the economic crisis has clearly been a contributing factor to America's rising suicide rate, perhaps it is not the only, or even the most important factor, behind the surge. In fact, another key factor appears to be at play: guns. Guns are the leading cause of suicide by far, according to the CDC report, accounting for nearly half (48 percent) all suicides among adults ages 35 to 64 in 2010. Slightly less than a quarter of suicides of people in this age group are caused by suffocation, and another 22 percent are poisonings, mainly drug overdoses."

The Gilded City: Bloomberg's 21st Century New York (The Nation Special Issue)

"New York, of course, has always been a city of striking contrasts, but its wealth gap is growing ever more extreme. The richest 1 percent of New Yorkers claimed almost 39 percent of the city’s income share in 2012—up from 12 percent in 1980. The money pouring in at the top of the income brackets has simply pooled there, without trickling down to the bottom or even the middle. This great pooling has occurred as median wages have fallen, the cost of living has increased, and the poverty rate has risen to 21 percent—as high as it was in 1980. As a result, America’s most iconic city now has the same inequality index as Swaziland."

Chicago Responds to the New York Times & their transplant, Rachel Shteir

It's a periodic tradition for the New York Times to print something completely out of touch about Chicago, Detroit or the Midwest in general. Last year it was a travel piece written by a dim-witted bimbo. This year it was Rachel Shteir's turn. Shteir established her credibility on all maters related to Chicago by declaring in 2010 that Rahm Emanuel would never be mayor because the city wouldn't elect a Jew... yeah.

In the Sunday Book Review Stheir prefaced her limited comments on the three books she supposedly read by bashing Chicago with the great enthusiasm. As you can imagine, Chicago's local media has not taken kindly. Shteir claims to have lived here for 13 years but displays a level of insight about our City that I would expect from someone who's only seen Chicago through a layover at O'hare. Perhaps she spends her weekends in New York.

Not Quite Detroit - Chicago as Described by the New York Times Book Critic (The Reader)

Chicago- based New York Times Book Critic Doesn't Get Chicago (The Chicagoist)

Where Are Chicago's women writers? - Right Here (Claire Zulkey, WBEZ)

Keep Your Head up - you're a Chicagoan (Neil Steinberg, The Sun Times)

Why does Chicago care about New York Times' Dope Slap (Bill Savage, Crain's)

Rahm Dismisses, Disses Rachel Shteir's Caustic New York Times Review (DNA Info)

The Morning Shift (WBEZ)

Everything you need to know about why Chicago is Furious with Rachel Shteir and the New York Times (Atlantic Cities)

Why People Perceive Some Cities as Safer than Others (Atlantic Cities)

"...Not surprisingly, feeling unsafe is closely associated with race and poverty. Resident perceptions of safety across metros are negatively correlated with the share of the population that is non-white (-.55), the share of residents below the poverty line (-.53), and the unemployment rate (-.47)."

... Metro Areas that are percieved as the safest in America are also the least diverse among major cities.

Culture Clash: New history of Chicago taps into our malaise (Chicago Tribune)

"The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream," which comes out this week from Penguin Press, has a gentle title and a sanguine black-and-white cover image of the rotating beacon on the roof of the old Palmolive Building throwing light over Lake Michigan. It also has an elegant, unflinching, non-nostalgic clarity about Chicago that you rarely see in books about Chicago. It gave me a dizzying rush, the impression that I had come across a new touchstone in Chicago literature, an ambitious history lesson no one had written: The story of how, from 1945 to 1960, Chicago created the culture that shaped American culture, delivering, in that brief window, Studs Terkel, McDonald's, Hugh Hefner, the atom bomb, modernist architecture, Chess Records, The Second City, the Chicago School of Television and "Kukla, Fran and Ollie."

Chicago Makes Modern: How Creative Minds Changed Society (Edward Lifson, Architect's Newspaper)

"To end then, we quote Moholy-Nagy, from Chicago Makes Modern. He wrote his wife, "There’s something incomplete about this city and its people that fascinates me...It seems to urge one on to completion. Everything still seems possible.”

I look out of the Reliance Building lobby, on a pre-spring day on State Street. Out there, people of all backgrounds hurry by, bent forward against the elements that hit you in the face in this creative, modern American metropolis. Most peek only fleetingly through the glass lobby windows.

But we’re united by the tall towers above, some still rising, the new ones mostly of taut glass. And at ground level, as I travel through the city, I see an equal number of broken-glass-filled empty lots on which, here in Chicago, everything still seems possible."

NYC's Luxury Housing Market (Atlantic Cities)

"In New York, luxury ghost apartments have been steadily proliferating, with certain parts of Manhattan especially devoid of life According to a 2011 New York Times article, in the chunk of the Upper East Side where the Chinese woman bought her little girl a future dream home, “about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant more than 10 months a year.” Census figures from 2010 show that since 2000, there was a 70 percent increase in absentee-owned apartments in Manhattan, which jumped from 19,000 to 34,000, with the wealthiest neighborhoods seeing even more pronounced gains."

... More evidence that Manhattan has become a Luxury escape pod for the World's superweathly and their spoiled offspring.

Chicago tackles the next big challenge in urban ag: Growing farmers (Grist)

"A new, seven-acre urban “accelerator farm” taking root on Chicago’s south side will soon grow one of the Windy City’s most-needed crops: farmers."

CHA residents marginally better off than when living in high-rises (Chicago Tribune)

"Public housing residents in Chicago are marginally better off today than when they lived in the high-rise towers that have since been torn down, though more social services are needed to prevent a backslide, a study scheduled to be released Monday finds."

"Opportunity Areas:" Long-Term Strategic Vision (City of Chicago)

"As part of a holistic and strategic vision to foster and seize upon growth and development in neighborhoods across Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel today announced nearly $3 billion in private and public development projects in seven targeted Chicago neighborhoods through a new “Opportunity Planning” initiative. The neighborhoods include Englewood, Pullman, Rogers Park, Uptown, Little Village, Bronzeville, and the Eisenhower Corridor."

A Short Lesson in Perspective (The SF Egoist)

"The creative industry operates largely by holding ‘creative’ people ransom to their own self-image, precarious sense of self-worth, and fragile – if occasionally out of control ego. We tend to set ourselves impossibly high standards, and are invariably our own toughest critics. Satisfying our own lofty demands is usually a lot harder than appeasing any client, who in my experience tend to have disappointingly low expectations. Most artists and designers I know would rather work all night than turn in a sub-standard job. It is a universal truth that all artists think they a frauds and charlatans, and live in constant fear of being exposed. We believe by working harder than anyone else we can evaded detection. The bean-counters rumbled this centuries ago and have been profitably exploiting this weakness ever since. You don’t have to drive creative folk like most workers. They drive themselves. Just wind ‘em up and let ‘em go."

A Brief History of Suburbia's Rise & Fall (Eric Jaffe, Atlantic Cities)

"All told, these movements resulted in behaviors of avoidance ("the determination to escape the vice, disease, ugliness, and violence of the city") and attraction ("the desire to embrace the virtue, health, beauty, and seclusion of the countryside") that combined to form suburban culture."

Saving Chicago Greystones (WBEZ)

"Greystones are to Chicago what brownstones are to Brooklyn. And while many of these stately, limestone-faceted beauties line the grassy boulevards of wealthy North Side neighborhoods, many others exist in a state of neglect, disrepair or abandonment."

[Down-sizing Baby Boomers] could cause the next Housing Crises (Emily Badger, Atlantic Cities)

"A vast majority of today’s households with children still want such houses, Nelson says. But about a quarter of them want something else, like condos and urban townhouses. That demand "used to be almost zero percent, and if it’s now 25 percent,” Nelson says, “that’s a small share of the market but a huge shift in the market.” And this is half of the reason why many baby boomers may not find buyers for their homes. “Even if the numbers matched,” Nelson says, “the preferences don’t.”

An endangered piece of history beneath Lake Michigan's surface (Julia Thiel, The Reader)

"Today that boiler is still visible from the beach, a boxy metal structure rising a few feet above the top of the water. From the shore it's easy to mistake for a rock or chunk of concrete, and for years I saw it without giving it a second thought. Last August, on a bike ride with a friend, I passed the concrete blocks that separate the beach from the Lakefront Trail and noticed a sign colorfully markered on a dry-erase board: SHIPWRECK TOURS 10:30-NOON, FREE."

Q & A with IIT Professor Marshall Brown (Architect's Newspaper)

"One of the ideas that I hold consistently for myself and for my own practice, but also try to communicate to the students, is that I truly believe, and I try to help them understand, that architecture is a cultural practice. It’s a discursive practice that sometimes, if we’re lucky, results in building. Exploring the implications of what that means is really important for me."

Can Chicagoans save the waterway that made their city great? (Matthew Power, On Earth Magazine)

"In the alternate vision, however, the river meets all of these demands -- and more. Its proponents seek nothing less than to turn the Chicago River into a civic treasure, its newly cleaned banks lined with parks and homes and restored ecosystems, its very presence a clear and shimmering symbol of a great city built on making, trading, connecting: a symbol of American history’s inexorable flow toward progress. And in the bargain, they seek to make the river a living -- and flourishing -- example of environmental innovation and ecological stewardship, one that generations of Chicagoans will cherish."

The Area: A Vanishing Corner of Englewood

Why do we keep anointing "it" cities? (Chuck Thompson, The New Republic)

"It starts with the local brewpub. Always with the goddamn local brewpub, located in some renovated craftsman schoolhouse or 1920s fire station with the locally sourced Czechoslovakian-style hops and the brewmaster with the certification from the Golden Barley Council or whatever governing body oversees alcoholic hipsterdom."

Why We Love Beautiful Things (Lance Hosey, NYTimes)

"Yet, while we are drawn to good design, as Mr. Hamel points out, we’re not quite sure why.

This is starting to change. A revolution in the science of design is already under way, and most people, including designers, aren’t even aware of it.

Take color. Last year, German researchers found that just glancing at shades of green can boost creativity and motivation. It’s not hard to guess why: we associate verdant colors with food-bearing vegetation — hues that promise nourishment."

This American Life: Harper High School, Part One

Illinois Adopts New Energy Efficiency Standards (Chris Bentley, The Architect's Newspaper)
"On January 1, Illinois became the second state, after Maryland, to adopt the nation’s strictest energy-efficient building code to date. Mandatory blower door and duct tests and mechanical ventilation are among the provisions now required for new commercial and residential buildings in the Land of Lincoln."

Anatomy of a Heroin Ring on Chicago's West Side (Mick Dumke, The Chicago Reader)

"The DEA estimates that 80 percent of the heroin and cocaine sold in Chicago originates with the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. Distributors here extend the cartel's reach by connecting with street gangs. The gangs, in turn, hasten the decline of distressed communities into open-air drug markets through their skillful use of product promotion, their ability to offer job opportunities where there are few, and their willingness, when necessary, to use violence to stay in business."

U of I to Open Chicago Manufacturing Institute (Greg Hinz, Crain's)

"Gov. Pat Quinn will announce today in his State of the State speech that the Urbana-Champaign school, in partnership with its National Center for Supercomputing Applications and private companies, will be forming an Illinois Manufacturing Lab likely to be located in the central area of Chicago.

The facility will be a somewhat smaller, more applications-based version of the UI Labs tech-research center that was announced in January by U of I President Robert Easter and others. The prime goal will be to make the state's manufacturers more competitive, something that has become increasingly challenging as overseas firms take control of many of the world's factories."

Can Chicago Become America's Next Great City for Artists? (David Zarley, Atlantic Cities)

"Broadly categorized as a performance artist, Duguid obtained her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has lived and worked in various locations across the U.S., including New York City. Duguid is a firm believer in Chicago as a place for an artist to flesh out his or her work. "You have a better opportunity of building a richer portfolio," Duguid explains. And there are an abundance of small scale, DIY apartment galleries which allow artists a freedom that may be hard to come by in Gotham."

Chicago & America Divided By Race, Economy & Violence

In the last month, as the gun control debate has become the focus of our national attention, Monica Davey of the New York Times has written a couple of important articles about the epidemic of violence on Chicago's South and West Sides. These articles have included excellent supporting graphics. Whet Moser of Chicago Magazine has added a local perspective as well.

In a Soaring Homocide Rate, A Divide in Chicago (Monica Davey, NYTimes)

More than 80 percent of the city’s homicides took place last year in only about half of Chicago’s 23 police districts, largely on the city’s South and West Sides. The police district that includes parts of the business district downtown reported no killings at all. And while at least one police district on the city’s northern edge saw a significant increase in the rate of killings, the total number there still was dwarfed by deaths in districts on the other sides of town, and particularly in certain neighborhoods.

Homicide, Social Efficacy & Poverty in Chicago (Whet Moser, Chicago Mag)

Strict Gun Laws in Chicago Can't Stem Fatal Shots (Monica Davey, NYTimes)

Chicago’s experience reveals the complications inherent in carrying out local gun laws around the nation. Less restrictive laws in neighboring communities and states not only make guns easy to obtain nearby, but layers of differing laws — local and state — make it difficult to police violations.

Chicago Gets Its Guns Where it Used to Get its Blues (Whet, Moser, Chicago Mag)

This is an extremely complex and frustrating issue. To begin, it should be noted that Chicago does not even crack the list of America's top 25 most violent cities. The City's murder rate is half of what it was twenty years ago. Last year not withstanding, the murder and crime rate has consistently declined since about 1992. There are a lot of reasons for the overall decline in the city's murder rate, including demographic change, gentrification, improved medical technology and improved policing strategies.

To put things in perspective, deaths by automobile accidents and suicide both outnumber death by murder in the United States by a rate of more than 2 to 1. Last year 32,310 people died by car accident, the lowest since 1949. By contrast there are around 13,000 murders a year in the United States.

Nevertheless, Chicago's murder rate remains significantly higher than what we would like to consider our "peer" national and global cities - places like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. The murder of Hadiya Pendleton a mile from President Barack Obama's Kenwood residence has personified the tragedy and self-destruction that the City's gang violence has caused.

American Violence and Southern Culture (Whet Moser, Chicago Mag)

"Part of Lemann's thesis, not that he ignores the effects of segregation and concentrated poverty, is that the divide between city and backcountry was also brought north: "Every aspect of the underclass culture in the ghettos is directly traceable to roots in the South -- and not the South of slavery but the South of a generation ago."

30 Architecture Documentaries to Watch in 2013  (ArchDaily)

More Losers than Winners in America's New Economic Geography (Richard Florida, Atlantic Cities)

Our main takeaway: On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits. Its benefits flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers whose higher wages and salaries are more than sufficient to cover more expensive housing in these locations. While less-skilled service and blue-collar workers also earn more money in knowledge-based metros, those gains disappear once their higher housing costs are taken into account.

Chicago planners push boldest bus-rapid-transit option (WBEZ)

"The design favored by the Chicago planners resembles the boldest of four BRT alternatives the city presented last fall for the corridor. Each direction of Ashland would have one regular traffic lane and a bus-only lane near the middle of the avenue."

Cook County Establishes a Landbank (Chris Bently, Architect's Newspaper)

Cook County is home to the nation’s third largest city, as well as some of the deepest economic craters left by the ongoing housing crisis. Some 40,000 vacant units, many of them underwater, restrain economic development in the second-most populous county in the U.S.

Now, following similar efforts underway in Kansas City, northeast Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, Atlanta, and Michigan, Cook County will establish a redevelopment authority aimed at stabilizing the region’s housing market.

U of I Unveils Big Chicago Tech Institute (Crain's)

"Hoping to jolt Chicago's expanding technology sector into high gear, City Hall, the state of Illinois and the University of Illinois are going public Thursday with plans to open a privately funded research lab in the city in the next year and a half or so that would draw major public-sector and federal financing."

Ruin Porn or Realism? Why Chicago's Artists Are Obsessed with Detroit (Chicago Mag)

"In the last half-decade, no less than five “exchange exhibitions,” several fact-finding missions and study trips, and a graduate seminar that positioned the entire city of “Detroit as material,” have contributed to a mushrooming local interest—let’s call it our Motor City crush—among artists, curators, and arts educators."

What is Middle Class in Manhattan? (Amy O'Leary, NYTimes via CNBC)

"The average Manhattan apartment, at $3,973 a month, costs almost $2,800 more than the average rental nationwide. The average sale price of a home in Manhattan last year was $1.46 million, according to a recent Douglas Elliman report, while the average sale price for a new home in the United States was just under $230,000."

Chicago's Year Without Snow (Whet Moser, Chicago Mag)

"What the winter gives us is awe. Not toughness or bragging rights, given how often so many of us fail at living heartily through it, especially as it plods slowly through February and March. "In Chicago I learned that the weather made me who I was," writes Staples. "The mood was impenetrable. I didn't know it was a mood until the sun came shining to the rescue. The lesson was new each time."

Image Source

A New Humanism Part 1 - 6 (Robert Lamb Hart, Metropolis Mag)

"My basic idea has been to step back, look at the unfinished cultural revolutions of Modernism, and continue to build on their defining enterprise—the rapid advance of reliable sciences. The impact they have had on construction-related technologies has been enormous. But the insights of the maturing sciences of nature and human nature—of evolution and ecology and how human biology interacts with an environment—are only beginning to be applied systematically in design education and day-to-day practice."

Cook County Ordinance to cut Construction Waste (Architect's Newspaper)

This law, which took effect November 21, affects some 2.5 million residents across 30 townships in suburban Cook County. While the City of Chicago mandates that 50 percent of debris be recycled—a 2007 ordinance, which, government officials note, contractors now easily exceed—building debris makes up a staggering 40 percent of landfill material nationwide.

Brooklyn's Affordability Crisis Is No Accident (Stephen Smith, Atlantic Cities)
"Its poor and middle-class residents, who 20 years ago might have been able to afford apartments just a stop or two from Manhattan in Williamsburg, are now being displaced to neighborhoods like Canarsie, East New York and Jamaica, where they struggle with long commutes. It won't be too long until they're pushed so far from job centers in Manhattan that they leave the city entirely, contributing to the growing sense that New York is too expensive for ordinary people."

Washington's Economic Boom, Financed By You (Annie Lowrey, NYTimes)

"How Washington managed this transformation, however, is not a story that the rest of the country might want to hear, because we largely financed it. As the size of the federal budget has ballooned over the past decade, more and more of that money has remained in the District. “We get about 15 cents of every procurement dollar spent by the federal government,” says Stephen Fuller, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and an expert on the region. “There’s great dependence there.” And with dependence comes fragility. About 40 percent of the regional economy, Fuller says, relies on federal spending."

"Pocket Neighborhoods" (Kaid Benfield, nrdc.org)

“Pocket neighborhoods, best defined as clusters of homes gathered around a landscaped common area, are springing up all over the country. The people who live in these most sought-after communities know they share something extraordinarily valuable: a model of community that provides a missing link. They have their cherished privacy, but with something more: they get to know each other in a meaningful way, and are able to offer one another the kind of support system that family members across town, across state or across country cannot.”

Architecture Is More Than Just Buildings: In Remembrance Of Ada Louise Huxtable (The New Republic)

"Huxtable never let her readers, or anyone else who would listen, forget that architecture is not like the other arts. Paintings or dance performances you choose to see or not see, but architecture envelops us all. Everyone sees and experiences it. Huxtable insisted both that architecture is an art and that it is an art that everybody deserves to enjoy precisely because it constitutes the life of our inhabited places."

Entrepreneur-in-Chief: The New Model City (Gapers Block)

"What we're feeling viscerally, but seeing from too close to appreciate, is the logical end of decades of neoliberalization of government, which has transformed a managerial state into an entrepreneurial one. Our mayors are now "entrepreneurs-in-chief," and the result is that governance has been transformed from a participatory process of pooling resources and regulating behavior for the public good into one of government by private negotiation and enticement of capital through competition between states, cities and even neighborhoods."

Food Oasis: Chicago (Chris Bently, The Architect's Newspaper)

The “Recipe for Healthy Places” plan would establish an informal urban agriculture district to help tackle food insecurity and obesity in the vicinity of Englewood, West Englewood, Washington Park, and Woodlawn. A 2.5-mile abandoned rail line could be the district’s spine, with open lots and parks around its periphery serving as a marketplace for local produce and artisanal products. Locals have taken to calling it the “New Era Trail.”

Photos of Mississippi River Drought (Chicago Mag)

Crime Migrates to Suburbs (Wall Street Journal)

"The decline in homicides nationally has overshadowed a countertrend: rising murders in the suburbs, the communities that ring cities and have long been promoted as havens from violent crime. U.S. homicides fell sharply from 2001 to 2010, including a 16.7% drop in big cities, according to a federal Bureau of Justice Statistics study of the most recent, reported data. That is because of a host of factors, including better medical treatment for victims of violent injury and aggressive police measures in megacities like New York and Los Angeles."

Black Gentrifiers & Chicago's Changing Neighborhoods (Emily Badger, Atlantic Cities)

"In most U.S. cities the word has generally come to imply the gradual taking of a place from one group (usually poor people, usually minorities) by another (usually middle- or upper-class whites). But in Bronzeville, a historically black neighborhood – once Chicago’s version of Harlem, the city’s “Black Metropolis” – the gentrifiers are black, too."

Goodby New York, Hello Minneapolis (The Economist)

"Will parts of Manhattan be left by people seeking higher, dryer ground? In the aftermath of another UN climate conference, our correspondents discuss migration and adaptation."