20th anniversary of the blog| Urban revitalization systems thinking's greatest hits: Part one -- (in)FAQ and my influences

This entry became very long, so I broke it up.

-- "20th anniversary of the blog|  Urban revitalization systems thinking's greatest hits: Part one -- (in)FAQ and my influences," (2025)
-- "20th anniversary of the blog| Urban revitalization systems thinking's greatest hits: Part two -- not transportation," (2025)
-- "20th anniversary of the blog| Urban revitalization systems thinking's greatest hits: Part three -- transportation," (2025)

=========

While I first created the blog in November 2004, with two entries (a reprint of an op-ed I wrote, and my photo), I consider it officially launched in February 2005, when I started writing regularly.  The URL is long because at the time I didn't appreciate the need for brevity.

I have over 12,000 entries.  While many are photos, and some are reprints, the fact is that the ouevre is a few million words in all likelihood.

Definitely, the formatting is better 20 years later.  I know how to better include URLs so they are findable years later.  And images.  Having the original URL means there is better chance it can be retrieved through archive.org

But the entries are long.  For many they are TL DR.

Why I use a form of unhidden bibliographical citation.  The style has evolved over the years.  I use a mixed form of citation, not hiding the link in a hyperlinked word, but more bibliographical.  My writing is somewhat "off putting" in that I try to write definitively so I've never had a lot of comments, but the intent of listing sources is that readers can read them and make up their own minds.

Media links.  I use a lot of newspaper links.  To get around registration I use Bypass Paywalls, Print Friendly, Archive.ph, sometimes the escape key at a key point, sometimes turning off java.    

Codifying my writings and thinking.  Part of the reason I started the blog was to have my writings in one place, as opposed to being spread across various listservs (remember those?).  I think a lot of my writing as reactive in that I read something that is either interesting or I disagree with it.  I also tend to write about multiple examples/places in an entry, rather than just one--it takes a few cases, and finally one spurs me to write.

Writing so best practice can be adopted and applied elsewhere.  The basic point was to write about best practice in ways that could be applied to other settings and how best to do it especially in DC,.  For example, I argued with this one guy in Columbia Heights who kept saying his community is unique.  I said all communities are unique, but few are exceptional in that they can't be categorized and compared.  

Similarly, when DC created its Main Street commercial district revitalization and we'd go to conferences, a lot of the city programs had a chip on their shoulder, believing they couldn't learn anything from small towns, even though the reality is that urban main street programs function like small towns more than a center city downtown.  I learn from all kinds of places.

I joke that I might be a s****y planner, but I am good at gap analysis, and DC has plenty of gaps in planning practice to generate lots of important insights.  Another joke is by comparison to the Greater Greater Washington blog, there is a fine line between whining and critical analysis.  I try to put forward a more rigorous way of thinking about the problem, with the aim of a solution.  Note that I am fine with identifying problems without having solutions.  I just don't like whining and repetition.

What got me off my ass to get involved.  I lived in DC for 13 years before I became an advocate and ground up planner.  I had always been interested in cities having lived in Detroit off and on until I was 12, and later in Ann Arbor.  When I came to the DC area to get a job, I specifically chose the city.

Anyway, around 2000 the Sierra Club had published a report Restore the Core, which they gave out at Adams Morgan Day, and it primed me.  

I felt if I didn't get involved my riot-surviving neighborhood would continue to languish.  A proposal by BP to take up most of a gateway block for a gas station was the spark.  

(There were a couple of other reports too:  DC at the Crossroads: Transportation Choices Today Could Bring Pleasant Living, Less Traffic Tomorrow by the local chapter of Friends of the Earth, and reports for the Financial Control Board by Alice Rivlin.)

Also this report from the UK got me interested in public space and place, Living Places: Cleaner, Safer, Greener, as well as the work done by organizations such as the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and English Partnerships.  The British Government was very much involved in "regeneration" at the time, and since the work is in English, it was easy to grasp.

My contribution to the field of urban planning.  If I were to assess my contribution to the profession of urban planning and revitalization, it would be about applying systems thinking to various elements that make up cities.  I should have been a professor and written this up as journal articles--which have much more longevity than a blog post, but c'est la vie.

Comments section as a source for further reading  For the past few years, rather than write short updates to posts or new posts based on additional information, often I append citations to the articles in the comment thread.

Why I write less these days.  The last few years I've written less, partially because "say something once, why say it again?," but also because my expectations for a piece are more rigorous and so they take longer to write. And being in Salt Lake now instead of DC (sadly, I am not likely to move back because of my health issues and the quality of medical care here), I am not quite in the thick of things the way I could be in DC.  (Plus I've had less energy being sick--you can measure my improvement by how I've been writing a lot more lately.)

I do have some pieces that I've been drafting for years, without publishing, such as on civic engagement and national service (since 2020!), or schools marketing.  I am also working on a piece on social infrastructure.

My influences: Why I look at things and draw conclusions the way I do.

Building neighborhood confidence/The Myth of Community Development.  At the Urban Forum in Philadelphia in 2003, I asked one of the speakers, Charles Buki, what were some of his key influences.  He mentioned the book by Rolf Goetze.  The idea that the point of government investment in community improvement wasn't to build dependency, but to stoke conditions to the point where private actors would continue to invest and improve on their own, without government assistance.

He then mentioned a New York Times Magazine article, "The Myth of Community Development," by Nicholas Lemann about why community development corporations mostly didn't succeed at improving neighborhoods.  Later I summarized it as building better housing for low income residents was important but not the way to improve the local microeconomy.  

Randy Stoecker of University of Wisconsin has written similarly, "The Community Development Corporation Model of Urban Redevelopment: A Political Economy Critique and an Alternative."

Diffusing innovation.  Another joke is that half of what I write about is best practice, the other half worst practice, but that might be an overstatement.  I happened across the book by Everett Rogers when I was in college.  Since, I have a five point concept about how to diffuse innovation.

From "Revitalization planning vs. positive thinking* as planning," (2018) and "Helping Government Learn," (2009). 

My own take on innovation theory and the development, replication, and the diffusion of innovation is along these lines.  First develop a new practice and figure out if it works. Duplicate it to see if it is more than a one-off thing. Continue to scale it up and figure out all the elements. Once you've one that, communicate out so it can be and is successfully diffused across communities.

1. Indicate -- identity the particulars of processes and structures of success and failure.
2. Duplicate -- figure out how to duplicate (repeat) success.
3. Replicate -- develop the systems, structures, frameworks to apply programs to different situations and communicate them throughout innovation networks.
4. Communicate -- push out the final product to communities of practice for more widespread adoption, recognizing that other places will bring new elements to the model.
5. Accelerate -- figure out how to speed up successful innovation and programs.

Systems thinking and networks.  The approach that undergirds my thinking and writing approach is the systems approach and the belief that often, communities and other elements should be conceptualized and thought of in terms of networks, that leveraging the power of networks is key.

Four books I read in college (three not for class), are the foundation for this way of thinking: 

• Social Psychology of Organizations, the various subsystems of organizations and their stage of development; 
• Strategic Marketing for Not-For-Profit Organizations which introduced the concept of organizational publics: the input public that provides resources, the throughput public that does the work, and the output public to whom the organization's efforts are directed; 
• Diffusion of Innovations, which outlines the process of the diffusion of innovations in various types of organizations; and 
• Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution, which discusses the difference between first and second order change--the former I describe as moving your socks from the top to the bottom drawer.  Nothing has changed.

Process redesign.  Another thread is in terms of process innovation.  When I came to DC in the late 1980s the books, Reengineering the Corporation and Reinventing Government were all the rage.  Governing Magazine was full of articles about government success.  Later I came across Process Innovation, which influenced me as well.

I joke that when I do a plan, I look at the outcomes that are generated routinely by the planning process.  If those aren't the desired outcome, I work backwards to figure out how to change the process.

Urban Regime Theory: governments and NGOs are about the long term and agenda setting.  While I am a huge proponent of the Growth Machine theory in understanding why cities make the decisions they do:

[Abstract] A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities. Conditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic, and political forces embodied in this growth machine. The relevance of growth to the interests of various social groups is examined in this context, particularly with reference to the issue of unemployment. Recent social trends in opposition to growth are described and their potential consequences evaluated.

UR theory is best at explaining how action is performed in a city or organization.  It's the flip side of Social Psychology of Organizations.

An urban regime can be preliminarily defined as the informal arrangements through which a locality is governed (Stone 1989). Because governance is about sustained efforts, it is important to think in agenda terms rather than about stand-alone issues. By agenda I mean the set of challenges which policy makers accord priority. A concern with agendas takes us away from focusing on short-term controversies and instead directs attention to continuing efforts and the level of weight they carry in the political life of a community. Rather than treating issues as if they are disconnected, a governance perspective calls for considering how any given issue fits into a flow of decisions and actions. This approach enlarges the scope of what is being analyzed, looking at the forest not a particular tree here or there. [emphasis added, in this paragraph and below] ...

By looking closely at the policy role of business leaders and how their position in the civic structure of a community enabled that role, he identified connections between Atlanta's governing coalition and the resources it brought to bear, and on to the scheme of cooperation that made this informal system work. In his own way, Hunter had identified the key elements in an urban regime – governing coalition, agenda, resources, and mode of cooperation. These elements could be brought into the next debate about analyzing local politics, a debate about structural determinism. 

Historic preservation/cultural landscape/urban design.  While the first initiative I got involved with was fighting a gas station proposed for much of a gateway block ("360 Apartment building + Giant Supermarket vs. a BP gas station, which would you choose?,"), soon I was introduced to historic preservation.  It was good timing.  I had just done a road trip from Florida to NJ and we stopped in a bunch of cities like Savannah and Charleston and I had already come to the conclusion that my neighborhood was no less beautiful, just different.

Back then, HP was one of the only ways to stabilize urban neighborhoods when residential choice trends favored the suburbs ("Historic preservation builds value, and is central to DC's competitive advantage as a unique place for residents and visitors," 2008, "1/3 right, maybe, but 2/3 wrong definitely on preservation as an urban revitalization strategy," 2011, "Demolition vs. Preservation as a neighborhood revitalization strategy: Baltimore, Muncie, Indiana, etc.," 2015).  

Changing Places by the then president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Cities: Back from the Edge, and Get Urban explain how to accentuate the positive qualities of historic building stock in the urban context.

Intricately woven into HP is urban design of the broader place--the width of streets and elements of the urban space like types of pavements, tree coverage, the mass and height of buildings, etc. Project for Public Spaces and    Whyte's book City: Rediscovering the Center are great resources, as is the British Urban Design Compendium (vol. 1, vol. 2) and Cy Paumier's Creating a Vibrant City Center: Urban Design and Regeneration Principles.

Walking City era urban form works the best for walking, biking and transit does it the best and DC is from that era ("Transportation and Urban Form: Stages in the Spatial Evolution of the American Metropolis").  

Attending an NTHP conference and other conferences later, I learned about thinking about preservation on a wide scale, the cultural landscape.  Technically, a neighborhood historic district is a cultural landscape as opposed to a single building.  The idea is that you determine the themes of an area's history and organize accordingly.

The main approach is executed through what are called "heritage areas."  The federal government designates them, so do some states, like Maryland.  Heritage areas cover a wide area, e.g. "Rivers of Steel," all the elements of steel production in Greater Pittsburgh, or "Handmade in America," folkloric craft production in the Blue Ridge Mountains, etc.  

What I have taken from cultural landscape studies is that you can treat an entire city as a heritage area, whether or not it's designated that way.  Baltimore is federally designated.  I argue that DC should manage its cultural resources as a city-wide heritage area, regardless of designation status.

Note that federal National Register Historic Districts only protect buildings from federal action.  Local ordinances are needed to provide additional protection.

Opposition to preservation.  WRT current criticism of historic preservation by people like Ed Glaeser, Matthew Iglesias ("Idiocracy concerning historic preservation from both Yglesias and Glaeser," 2011), and Binyamin Applebaum ("Historic Preservation Is Hurting Cities," letters, "Preserving Historic Buildings," and "I Want a City, Not a Museum," letters, "Should Historic Buildings Give Way to New Housing?," New York Times), I argue that HP saved the neighborhoods that people clamor to live in today during the many decades that trends disfavored urban living.  But HP has been better at figuring out a stabilization strategy during the time of the shrinking than it has in periods of growth.

Nonetheless, most cities have plenty of build out opportunity elsewhere to be able to accommodate new construction plus old buildings suitable for conversion.  Besides, all the advocates clamoring to tear down historic buildings and construct new in their place fail to comprehend that new construction is the most costly as labor, materials, land and financing are all at current prices.

Patience.  I can't claim I'm patient about change, but in my 40s, when I realized a "fast tracked" transportation project takes 6 or 8 more years, I realized you have to accept that it takes a long time.  Some DC projects I've been involved in have taken from 13 to 20+ years to come to fruition.

Retail metrics.  These numbers pre-date e-commerce and work from home so they have to be changed.  In Cities in Full, Steve Belmont argues you need 10,000 people in close proximity to support a commercial district, and 15,000 to support a commercial district with entertainment, like a movie theater.  (Colleges with large student populations will change the latter some).

The since merged into AECOM Economic Research Associates used to say a resident supports 1.5 s.f. to 7.5 s.f. per person.  And an office worker supports 3 s.f. of quick service food/restaurant space and 2 s.f. of service retail.

Just on the basis of these numbers many communities are building too much retail space.

In terms of operating the business, the Main Street recommendation is that a traditional retailer spend no more than 4% of its gross revenue on rent.  For restaurants it's 10-15% because of higher sales (some restaurants actually pay out a proportion of gross revenue).

DC's competitive advantages.  These were, before covid and work from home, the city's competitive advantages.  WRT the federal government, the city also has to contend with the disinvestment agenda of the Republican party, including relocation of agencies to other parts of the county.

1. Historic residential, commercial, and civic architecture
2. Historicity (the nexus of people and place)
3. Walking City Urban Design.
4. Transit Network
5. The steady employment engine of the federal government.

Rating the condition of neighborhoods and commercial districts.  In the 1970s HUD commissioned a study to rate neighborhoods.  They came up with 4-7 stages. Most places call them Distressed (high/low); Emerging (high/low); Transitioning (high/low); and Healthy.   But the original categorization is different:

• Stage 1: Healthy. Homogeneous housing and moderate to upper income, insurance, and conventional financing available. 
• Stage 2: Incipient decline. Aging housing, decline in income and education level, influx of middle-income minorities, and fear of racial transition. 
• Stage 3: Clearly declining. Higher density, visible deterioration, decrease in white in-movers, more minority children in schools, mostly rental housing, and problems in securing insurance and financing. 
• Stage 4: Accelerating decline. Increasing vacancies, predominantly low income and minority tenants or elderly ethnics, high unemployment, fear of crime, no insurance or institutional financing available, declining public services, and absentee-owned properties. 
• Stage 5: Abandoned. Severe dilapidation, poverty and squatters, high crime and arson, and negative cash flow from buildings.

In examining why the streetscape investment in 8th Street SE (Barracks Row) had success so quickly, I figured out that while the residential neighborhood around it was probably rated healthy, the commercial district was low transitioning and the streetscape changes gave investors and proprietors the confidence to invest.  That made for fast, visible results.

I came to the conclusion that you can use these ratings to rate neighborhoods as a whole, the residential or commercial sections separately, and even block by block.  And that interventions should be guided accordingly.  E.g., movable tables and chairs or benches are difficult to justify in distressed places as they are more apt to breed vandalism rather than placemaking.

Sustainable mobility.  Refers to modes other than the motor vehicle, especially "single occupancy vehicle trips."  It generally refers to walking, rolling, biking, and transit.  It can include car sharing.  By contrast active transportation is non-motorized, walking and biking only.  It wouldn't include e-bikes, e-scooters, etc.

Transportation and Urban Form.  "Transportation and Urban Form: Stages in the Spatial Evolution of the American Metropolis," is a paper by Peter Muller that was published in the textbook Geography of Urban Transportation.  

It posits four stages: The Walking City era (before 1890); Streetcar City (1890-1920); the Recreational Auto era (1920-1950), where the automobile became the primary form of transportation for the American Household, and the Metropolitan City (1950-present) where center cities and suburbs are organized at the metropolitan scale.  This paper has had tremendous impact on how I think about urban transportation. 

Transportation Demand Management.  Arlington County Virginia is well known for its focus on TDM, which focuses on movement and throughput of people as opposed to vehicles.  

It turns out TDM was "invented" in Victoria State, Australia, by a then activist who realized if they could reduce the number of car trips, they didn't need to add lanes to roads and freeways.  

David Engwicht's book Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns: Better Living through less traffic is a good introduction.

What's great about Arlington's Master Transportation Plan is that the entire set of plan elements such as Parking and Curbside Management or Transit are internally consistent and follow from the Goals and Policies element.  It's been a big influence.