Quote of the Day

"Yes, cities have souls - and Philadelphia, despite our rough-and-tumble veneer- has a sensitive soul within. Our sense of self as a city - as Philadelphians - is defined by intangibles. By the size of our streets and the dirt under our feet. By the crowning heights of our skyscrapers and the tattered edges of our former industrial glory. By the food truck and the sidewalk café.

Cities are ephemeral collectives of the best and worst of man, housing homages to civilization in our great temples of art and culture and barely housing the homeless lying on the sidewalks. Cities are places of contradiction and tension as much as places of change and choice."

From the January 28th Philadelphia Daily News article called "Saving the City's Historic Soul"
To read the entire article, click here.

Famous Album Covers Depicting Cities

War - The World is a Ghetto

Bob Dylan - Freewheelin'
Nas - Illmatic

The Beatles - Abbey Road

Booker T. and the MG's - Up Tight

The Philadelphia Experiment

Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffitti

Slick Rick - The Great Adventures of

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - The Message

Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition

Shanghai, China one of the fastest growing cities in the world displays it's past city planning history and future with their new museum, the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition. While Shanghai maybe not the first city people think of for city planning history but for a city that plans to triple their metro lines in eight years, build 12 towns in the suburbs and host a World Expo in 2010, the city is definitely on the cutting edge of planning.

The Exhibition has five floors that detail the ambitious plans of Shanghai's urban planners. Visitors are provided with a glimpse of how Shanghai will look like in a couple of decades. The centerpiece on the third floor is a huge model of the city as it is now.

For an article and video about the Exhibition, click this link.

So what is your opinion? Would you like to see an Urban Planning Museum in your city? And if you did, what exhibits would you like to see?

Legos now, buildings later

A Denver Post article published on January 26th ran an interesting article about high school students learning about City Planning through Legos.

Except from the article:

To help students understand urban planning's impact, Littleton High School history and civics teacher Cheri Strother grouped civics students into teams of five or more and walked them through a program that involved responding to a request for proposal, or RFP, to redevelop Elmwood, a rundown neighborhood in the fictional city of Yorktown.
Completing the RFP required students to use finance, marketing and planning skills, create models of their plans, deal with conflicting political and social agendas, and present their proposal to the Yorktown City Council, a group of Colorado real estate professionals who volunteered to choose a winning project.

For the entire article, click here.

The program was ran by UrbanPlan, which is a joint venture between the Urban Land Institute and the University of California, Berkley. This program is an excellent way to expose young students about city planning, especially since the larger public at large is often confused on exactly what city planners do.

So what is your opinion, do you believe City Planning should be apart of grade school's curriculum?

An Interactive Map on Urban Growth

The BBC has provided a great interactive map detaing urban growth in cities from 1955 to 2015. It's pretty amamzing to see the phenomenal growth of cities in Asia, especially compared to the slow growth of cities in the west.

From BBC's website:

The World's urban population is expected to hit 4 Billion between 2015 and 2020, about the as same China becomes more than 50% urbanized. Most of the growth will happen in Africa and Asia, with Africa's Urban population growing fastest in percentage terms and Asia seeing the biggest volume of growth.

To view the map, click here.

So what is your opinion of the map and it's projections?

Hip Hop & City Planning Series

How Urban Renewal programs birthed the conditions that created Hip Hop.

Urban Renewal programs which sought to rid American cities of blight often times created more blight by displacing thousands of city residents, expedited white flight into the suburbs, created the modern housing project, and created “hyper-ghettos” that isolated the poor and disconnected them from jobs. All of these factors led to the poverty, despair and disenfranchisement found in the crumbling neighborhoods of the South Bronx and other inner-city ghettos that helped create the culture and music of Hip Hop. Hip Hop was born in the 1970’s after the death and failures of President Lyndon Johnson’s, War on Poverty, the Civil Rights era and lastly from the programs that created the modern day ghetto, Urban Renewal.

To give some background of how Urban Renewal programs started, we have to look back to what caused the Federal Government to initiate “blight removal” aka Urban Renewal. Many American cities before World War II, were major Industrial hubs which were defined by major industry and workforce housing for factory workers. During World War II, which was America’s industrial peak, hundreds of thousands southern Blacks migrated to northern cities to find work in factories. While some were fortunate and were able to find work, many did not and still faced discrimination. Without jobs, many southern blacks were forced into existing segregated black neighborhoods which quickly became overcrowded. When soldiers returned back home, the over crowdedness in cities became more dire and the effects of America’s largest baby boom were beginning to be felt.

While many black neighborhoods were often in distress at the time when urban renewals programs began in the 1940’s, not all black inner city neighborhoods were slums. During Urban Renewal many middle class black neighborhoods were targeted for city civic projects or highway construction through their neighborhoods for the supposed greater good of the city. The targeting of black neighborhoods for highways created a two folded problem for cities, the first was that it destroyed viable neighborhoods and the second is that highways allowed whites to funnel out into the suburbs (which blacks were excluded from) and still easily connect back to city’s downtown without having to interact with inner city.

While some neighborhoods were cleared for highways other neighborhoods were cleared for the construction of public housing and some were rehabbed for wealthy neighborhoods (Society Hill in Philadelphia). The clearing of neighborhoods for urban renewal often times gave very little acknowledgement toe the displacement of thousands of people whose homes were being destroyed. The displaced residents of urban renewal were forced to move into what they could afford which were adjoining distressed poor neighborhoods which often times sank further into poverty.

Black families that had the capital to move, sought houses outside the black community which sadly triggered the irrational fears of the white community (fueled by real estate developers) that blacks moving in would quickly turn their neighborhoods into slums. Whites afraid of lower property values as well as other fears fled their neighborhoods if not the city. On top of this White G.I.’s returning from World War II were often given generous FHA loans to houses away from blighted cities, however black soldiers were often denied FHA loans. This domino effect led to quick disinvestments of the city’s tax base and a sudden shift in the socio-economic and demographic make-up of the city.

To rid cities of outdated slum housing, city planners sought to construct clean, well-run public housing high-rises with modern amenities in replace of existing slums. (Note: A previous post called, Great Planning Documentaries, included a film “A Place to Live” which covered the slum clearance of a North Philadelphia neighborhood for the infamous and later dangerous Housing project known as The Richard Allen Projects, which Bill Cosby grew up in and were the inspiration fro the cartoon series, Fat Albert.) Unfortunately, the construction of public housing ultimately caused more problems then it aimed to solve.

One of the many problems that public housing caused during the urban renewal era was compacting highly dense impoverished populations in poverty. Housing projects lacked access to jobs in their own neighborhoods and continued a downward spiral with the economic opportunity or any type of economic advancement within their community. This downward spiral into further poverty allowed public housing projects to become a magnet to crime and other social ills that plague cities. Ultimately the idea of housing the poor in isolated housing project towers was viewed as a mistake as most of the housing projects across the nation were tore down in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Although, many housing project were tore down in the 1990’s, by the early 1970’s the damage that these public housing projects had caused by concentrating poverty as economic investment had funneled out of the city, leaving the poor more and more isolated had already been done. In the early 1970’s the funding to many urban renewal projects was being cut off which included the federal funding to cities to help maintain various city renewal projects including public housing. As maintenance for public housing all but ceased, public housing projects quickly deteriorated and repelled any economic development which caused even more blight to surrounding neighborhoods.

By the mid 1970s, desegregation was beginning to take off that allowed more middle class blacks to move away from blighted neighborhoods which further led to the isolation of blacks in housing projects and run-down blocks. Property owners in these neighborhoods, who could not find anyone to buy their abandoned or half vacant properties, often set arson to their buildings so that they could collect on some money through insurance. These acts of arson left an even more scarring image to inner-cities, especially major cities in the east. In the South Bronx, the undisputed birth place of Hip Hop it is estimated that the Bronx borough lost 40% of its housing stock by the late 1970’s. During his 1980 Presidential campaign, then California Governor made a campaign stop in the Bronx and had remarked that the Bronx looked like London after the Blitz in World War II.

All of the conditions that were either caused or triggered by Urban Renewal programs had laid down the many problems of today’s modern inner-city. While many of today’s problems would have existed without Urban Renewal, there is no doubt that these blight removal programs exacerbated the problem.

These impoverished conditions left the children growing up in these neighborhoods with no voice and no outlets. The economic conditions of these kids made them improvise to let their expressions be heard. While they had no instruments, local Dee Jay’s would take the breakbeat of soul records and make a sampled sound that was uniquely their own. Kids who did not have a dance floor would often use pieces of cardboard boxes and use that as their dance floor as they danced to the breakbeat. These breakbeat dancers would later be called B-Boys. As the B-Boys danced, the Dj would make simple rhymes about who he was, how nice is skills were and where he was from. This eventually laid the basis to what we know as rapping today. The kids, who grew up in these neighborhoods that looked like war zones, could not afford art utensils so they made their world a canvas. The kids, known as graffiti bombers would “bomb” walls, trains or any other visible piece of infrastructure and spray-paint their names as tags on buildings to let the world know who they were…or more importantly let the world know they exist. Eventually graffiti bombing took off into intricate designs of their own style which became the neighborhood’s public art.

Once you combine the Dj, the B-Boys, the rappers, and the graffiti bombers you have all the major elements of hip hop. An art form and culture that is uniquely American and was uniquely born out of ghettos of America’s inner-cities that were shaped by the failures of Urban Renewal programs.

All of these conditions can be illustrated in Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s song, The Message. Filmed in the Bronx, the music video was the first early hits in Hip Hop and was the first to talk about the social conditions of the ghetto that created their art.
Excerpts from the song:

First verse –
Broken glass everywhere
People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care
I can't take the smell, I can't take the noise
Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice
Rats in the front room, roaches in the back
Junkies in the alley with the baseball bat
I tried to get away, but I couldn't get far
Cause a man with a tow-truck repossessed my car

Last Verse:
A child is born with no state of mind
Blind to the ways of mankind
God is smiling on you but he's frowning too
Because only God knows what you’ll go through
You’ll grow in the ghetto, living second rate
And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate
The places you’re playin’, where you stay
Looks like one great big alley way...

The Rise and Fall of the Shopping Mall

The December issue of The Economist ran a great story about the history, the rise and eventual fall of the modern shpping mall.
Here's an excerpt:
"America now has some 1,100 enclosed shopping malls, according to the International Council of Shopping Centres. Clones have appeared from Chennai to Martinique. Yet the mall's story is far from triumphal. Invented by a European socialist who hated cars and came to deride his own creation, it has a murky future. While malls continue to multiply outside America, they are gradually dying in the country that pioneered them."

Ironically the creator of the modern American mall had designed malls to replicate European shopping and civic districts where the community whould shop, eat and discuss the issues of the day. To read the entire article, click here.

Closer to home in Baltimore, many area malls have died recently and have been reconverted into "Avenues" where chain retail stores now face out onto an internal street with angled parking, mimicking a small town's main street. Often times these "Avenues" that are beautifully landscaped have internal roads that lead back to an expressway and are surrounded by a sea of parking. Check out "The Avenue at White Marsh" and "The Hunt Valley Town Centre"

For the Baltimoreans

The State Center Redevelopment Project

The Project Vision Statement from the State Center's website cites:

"The State Center redevelopment offers the rare chance to build on the tremendous economic power of the State's office presence in Baltimore and knit together existing transit, cultural, institutional, university and neighborhood assets.
The ultimate vision for the State Center is a diverse, inclusive, mixed-use income community that promotes public transportation, maximizes the use and interest in public open spaces and provides for an active, walkable street environment..."


The website cites that the ultimate goal is to connect and integrate the State's office complex with the surrounding neighborhoods and in the process become on of the City's most attractive arts, entertainment, retail and residential districts.


The State Center will be a huge project for revamping downtown Baltimore's northwest edge as well as providing a boost to the culture rich neighborhoods of Mt. Vernon and Bolton Hill and to the MLK transit corridor. But what will this redevelopment project mean for the adjacent McCulloh Homes community? Will the pressure of redevelopment ultimately threaten their community to be redeveloped as market-priced Housing?


What are your thoughts? Feel free to comment, especially for those who were able to attend the January 23rd public meeting.


For more Information, click here.

Who Controls your City Transit Agency?

A Map of Philadelphia's Rail System

Today, many city transit agencies are in constant financial crises as they are forced to maintain a transit system to inner city commercial corridors that have been in decline for decades now. With commercial corridors moving away from cities and residential development leap frogging to different highway exits, city transit systems have been unable to provide transit to a constantly moving population. The decline of ridership which has lead to a decline in revenue has left many city transit agencies dependent on the aid of other sources.

When a city transit agency only has a small percentage of its revenue coming from fares generated, the city transit agency has to depend on other sources, such as neighboring suburban counties, to help fund their services. Often times the source that provides the majority of the funding dictates the policy recommendations for that transit agency.

When non-transit planners are making transit agency decisions over regional transit needs, they often times they will put the needs of their constituents over the transit needs of the whole region. So if suburban counties are providing major funding to a city transit agency, they are more likely to push for transit lines (such as light rail or heavy rail) that connect suburban communities to downtown while providing little connection back to the existing transit system or the larger city as a whole.

Situations like these often lead to bad transit planning which often is reflected in transit ridership numbers. The mistakes of bad transit planning, such as spending billions on light rail systems that benefit the few and not the whole has wasted funding, time and energy that could have been used to upgrade the existing system. Such costly mistakes has allowed existing transit systems to deteriorate while making transit agencies maintain suburban costly suburban commuter lines for suburbanites who still preferred to commute by car.

So what is your opinion? Do you live in a metropolitan region where suburban counties dictate transit planning? If you are not sure, ask yourself whether or not your metropolitan region has a well running suburban commuter line system and a deteriorating city transit system.

Big Box Stores and the Inner City

The rise of the Big Box store came into vogue in the American suburbs in the late 1970’s into the 1980’s and has become a staple of suburbs ever since. While as city planners, we are not crazy about the one-story, single land use that consumes so much land with floor space and parking, it can not be denied that these stores are profitable.

Unfortunately, big box stores have been reluctant to say the least to open stores within the inner-city. While many cite factors such as the inner city being not the right clientele or crime, others have simply stated inner city neighborhoods do not have the floor space and acreage available to meet their standard building footprints.

Recently, many big box retail chains have started to invest in cities and have modified their typical building size with smaller square footage, multiple floors and reduced parking or parking garages. The question we pose with this new trend is - Do big box stores hurt cities?

Cities by nature combine several land uses on a single property and will have smaller retail stores competing with each other which often lowers prices and provides better services to customers. Big box stores which were created under the Euclidean zoning of the suburbs do just the opposite of what urban retail is tailored for.

We all know that big box retail has a tendency to make local stores go out of business but what is your opinion of big box stores when they go into depressed markets that have very limited retail? Will the big box store create a market where only large retail can survive or do you believe that a big box store can be a generator of economic growth in the inner city?

What are your thoughts?

More examples:

Martin Luther King Jr Boulevards

Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in Portland

All across America's inner-cities are streets named after the great civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Many of these streets that bear Dr. King's name are found within the commercial corridors of historically black neighborhoods.

Often times these historical black commercial corridors have deteriorated through decades of disinvestment that was ironically triggered by desegregation which was apart of Dr. King's dream.

For many inner-city residents, Dr. King's dream is a dream deferred as poverty rates, unemployment, high school graduation rates are comparable to the economic conditions of pre-segregation as can be seen by a drive though the many inner-city boulevards bearing Dr. King's name.

Here is a photo compilation of Martin Luther King Jr Boulevards found in America's inner-city.

Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in San Antonio

Martin Luther King Street in New Orleans

Matin Luther King Jr Boulevard in Harlem

Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in St. Louis

Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in Los Angeles

Welcome to Springfield

Do the cartoons plan cities better than planners do? Judge for yourself with the interactive map of the cartoon town of Springfield, USA from the tv show, The Simpsons.

To view the interactive map, click here.

After looking at the interactive map, I think the EPA would have something to say about the Dump and recycling center being right next to Springfield Lake.

What $1 Million Buys in Homes Worldwide

"Google Earth Nas, I got flats in different continents" (c) Nas, from the song Success

Home prices across the country and in many parts of the world swelled over the last few years, with coastal cities around the globe seeing unprecedented growth.
We knew that in the U.S., $1 million will no longer buy estate homes and mansions as it did in years past, with smaller coastal cities like Annapolis, Maryland that are selling million dollar rowhouses. However, overseas with the American dollar being weak, $1 million buys less than ever.

For more info, click here.

$1M Rowhouse in San Fransico, Califronia

$1M Flat in Paris, France

$1M in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt

For the Baltimoreans

Fells Point's Recreation Pier to be turned into a Hotel

Recreation Pier in Fells point maybe recognized to many outside of Baltimore as the police station in NBC's hit show, "Homicide: Life on the Street," but to Baltimoreans, the pier was a historic landmark that was anchor not only to Fells Point but to the waterfront as well.

Today the city of Baltimore is preparing to sell the pier and it's historic structure to developers who will develop the property into a new W Hotel and restaurant. The developers will also make costly repairs to the pier which is deteriorating and poses a risk to the foundation of this historic structure. The proposed hotel will have 130 rooms and a restaurant on the top floor over looking harbor.

For more info on the Recreation Pier and Fells Point, click here.

Save 1520 Sedgwick Avenue... aka the Birthplace of Hip Hop

There is an ongoing battle in the Bronx to save 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the housing project known for giving birth to hip hop back in 1973. In August 1973, Kool Herc, known as the founder of hip hop, threw what was to be the first hip hop house party in history. Scholars, musicians, and the media now recognize 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, aka General Sedgwick House, in the Bronx borough of New York City, as the birthplace of hip hop, a uniquely American musical genre and culture that has taken over the world.

The owner plans to remove the building from its affordable housing program and hand it over to private investors for market rate housing. DJ Kool Herc and Senator Charles Schumer have stepped in to help residents take control and preserve the property as a national cultural landmark, but they need your help in saving what is affectionately known as Sedgwick & Cedar.

For more info Click here.

I Am Legend...Visions of a Post-Apocaluptic Tokyo

Motoda Hisaharu’s Neo-Ruin series of lithographs depicts a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, where familiar landscapes in the central districts of Ginza, Shibuya, and Asakusa are reduced to ruins and the streets eerily devoid of humans. The weeds that have sprouted from the fissures in the ground seem to be the only living organisms. “In ‘Neo-Ruins’, I wanted to capture both a sense of the world’s past and of the world’s future,” he explains.











































































Motoda’s view of the future at first seems nihilistic, but the proliferation of plant life in the ruined streets seems to suggest that there are other ways for the plant to survive even after our great cities have fallen.

Magic Highway USA

Hip Hop has come a long way

The newly inaugurated mayor of Philadelphia performs the hip hop classic, "Rapper's Delight"

An Inner City Staple...The Corner Store

Corner stores or "Mom & Pop" stores have been the staple to many inner-city neighborhoods for well over a century. However with the rise of convenience stores and pharmacies such as Rite Aid and CVS, corner stores have been slowly disappearing from the urban landscape. Well not totally extinct, many can not compete against national corporation chains.

While there have been some corner stores that are known for having inferior products, limited products, marked up prices and even being a front for criminal activity, there is no doubt that through out time many corner stores have served as the life blood and the center piece for many inner-city neighborhoods.

Corner stores were long known for being located only in cities as suburban locales often separated residential and commercial land uses making it illegal to have a residence and a business on the same property. Today, some locales have seen the error in separating land uses and are now encouraging mixed use design.

Unfortunately this shift in thinking may be too late to save corner stores as cities once knew them as many of them have closed of the years and have gone into blight.

So we ask what is your opinion of the corner store? Do you have any favorite memories? glad their closing? Share your thoughts on the comment page.

The Cityscapes of Mikhail Evstafiev

Mikhail Evstafiev (b. 1963) is a Russian artist, photographer and journalist. He began painting and photographing at an early age. His mother, grandmother and great grandfather — all prominent Russian sculptors — inspired him to develop his own style and art.

City Feelings



















Village Reflected



















The Penthouse



















The Red Avenue



















Which one is your favorite painting?

Quote of the day

"Hip-Hop is not just a mirror of what is, it should be a mirror of what can be. A lot of people say, ‘I want to be real. I want to be down.' Then we’re just trapped in 'What is.' Imagine something different. Imagine communities that aren’t torn up by violence. Imagine that we’re respecting our women. Imagine communities where knowledge and reading and academic excellence are valued, communities where fathers are doing right by their kids. Art can’t just be a rearview mirror. It should have a headlight on there pointing to where we need to go."

- Barack Obama

For the rest of the article, click here.

NIMBYisms' and Drug Treatment Centers

The Baltimore City Council is again considering legislation that would permit live-in drug treatment centers to open in more residential neighborhoods.

Though the same bill has faced opposition from neighborhood groups in the past, Mayor Sheila Dixon's administration is under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice to loosen the city's zoning laws - which critics charge are used to limit the centers - or face a federal lawsuit.
Click here for the entire article.

Do you agree with the city's stance of limiting the number of drug treatment center.
Would you be comfortable having a drug treatment center in your neighborhood even if for the long run the treatment centers would ultimately help improve society?

The City sues Well Fargo over Reverse Redlining

In an January 8, 2008 atricle, the Baltimore Sun reports that the city is filing suit against Wells Fargo Bank over what the City calims asunfaily markeing subprime mortgages to Black neighborhoods. Click this link for the article.

In a potentially groundbreaking lawsuit intended to stem foreclosures in Baltimore, Mayor Sheila Dixon's administration is suing a leading mortgage provider for what the city says has been a pattern of predatory lending in black neighborhoods.

The lawsuit, which the Dixon administration plans to file today in U.S. District Court, alleges that California-based Wells Fargo Bank sold higher-interest subprime mortgages to blacks more frequently than to whites and that the practice, known as reverse redlining, violates federal housing law.

Though Baltimore's lawsuit does not estimate the financial cost of the foreclosure crisis to the city, the city claims that is has lost tens of millions of dollars - in unrealized property tax revenue, added police and fire protection and legal costs - because of homes abandoned after foreclosure.

What are your thoughts?

Reshaping the Harbor

The Baltimore Waterfront is expanding with major development. The Waterfront communities of Canton and Harbor East have seen dramatic revivals in the past decade and have now become the new "it" neighborhoods for Baltimore City.
With a dozen or so developments being proposed on the water, the Baltimore Harbor is seeing a second renaissance.

Here are a few images and descriptions of proposed development in downtown and on the waterfront.

10 Inner Harbor - 59 stories (717 ft.)
Location: 414 Light Street at Conway St. (Inner Harbor)
Developer: ARC Wheeler Group
Total Investment: $300 million
Completion Date: N/A
Uses: 285 condo units, 192-room hotel, ground and second level retail, grocery store, resturants
Status: Approved










Water Tower - 32 stories
Location: 414 Water Street (City Center)
Developer: LH Water Toner, LLC
Total Investment: $65 million
Completion Date: 2007
Uses: 312 condo units, 6000sq ground level retail, 10-story above ground parking
Status: Under Construction

Four Seasons Hotel and Residences (44 stories) and Legg Mason World Headqarters Tower (24 stories)

Location: Aliceanna Street (Harbor East)

Developer: H&S Properties Development Corp

Total Investment: $550 million

Completion Date: N/A

Uses: 200 5-star hotel rooms, an unnamed number of private residences, 25000sq ground level retail including three resturants, 1200 parking spaces, 500K office space.

300 E. Pratt Street - 35 stories

Location: 300 East Pratt Street (Inner Harbor)

Developer: 300 E. Pratt Street, LP

Total Investment: $100 million

Completion Date: N/A

Use: Office space, 250 luxury residential units, 500-space above ground garage, 16000sf ground level retail.

Status: Approved

Canton Crossing - 17 story Office Tower, multiple residential & office high-rises

Location: 3301 Boston Street

Developer: Hale Properties

Total Investment: $1 Billion

Completion Date: Tower completed, other buildings underway

Use: 1 million square feet of Class-A office space, 250,000 square feet of retail space, a 450-unit luxury hotel, 500 condominiums, 150,000 square foot Cruise Ship Terminal