Greetings from St. Petersburg

I do a fair amount of writing that never makes it into the blog. One has been a discussion within a thread of an entry on the Frozen Tropics blog. I tend to be pretty consistent, arguing for a strengthening and extension of urban form within DC, rather than encouraging or accepting building and site design based on suburban, car-oriented forms.

That's why I continue to rail against the Brentwood Shopping Center as an example of execrable crap, crap that could have easily been avoided, had the city demanded it.

But some of the response, when I write such, is that the area wasn't anything before, so why should I be advocating for something better?

I call this "better than a parking lot/better than cinder block" kind of thinking.

One of my colleagues always says, when I recount such stories, "why do you even bother trying to talk to such people?"

I guess it's because I think that at the root, people have potential. They're just seemingly "uninformed" (a classmate suggested this word during a recent discussion where I had been talking about the standard level of discourse on DC-area websites about land use and planning issues, using the word "dumb" -- "stupid" would have also sufficed; although it's really 50/50 or 60/40 maybe, some people and some threads are really really great, but in any case it seems as if the discourse doesn't improve over time, as new threads and storylines are introduced) because they have been patterned with a suburban land use and development paradigm of value engineered, visually degraded, automobile-connected, low density segregated uses. And they don't realize that (1) they have been patterned by this paradigm; (2) which isn't appropriate for city places. (This is why I fervently call myself an "old urbanist" rather than a "new urbanist.")

Steve Pinkus, this blog's erstwhile photocorrespondent (check this out for more of his photos) shares with us a couple shots of streets in St. Petersburg, Florida.

It made me think about DC as a place for residents and visitors. Sure we want to go visit places like St. Petersburg in the winter especially, but why if it looks like this?

Even beyond the aesthetic value of living in beautiful places, there is great economic value as well. (See for example, "The Market for Mixed Use & Walkability" by Laurence Aurbach.)


Index Keywords: urban-design-placemaking