Fun reads

Every so often I make it a point to go through the backfile writings of two columnists for the Telegraph's Travel section.  Chris Moss writes about the good and bad of places, which is useful for harvesting best practice and ideas for destination management.  Chris Leadbeater too.

It's funny how those of us in the US think the London Underground is a world beater for mass transit.  It is.  But to Chris Moss it pales compared to best practice in other cities.

-- "London’s Tube system is broken. These are the countries that do it better"

The Financial Times isn't available in print in Utah, except maybe by mail.  The Life & Arts section on Saturdays always has some good articles.  A couple on town building include:

-- "How to make a town"

-- "Inside Welborne, the new town making its own rules"

Robert A.M. Stern's architecture firm designs new buildings of all types.  But in historic preservation circles, he's known for designing "new" apartment buildings in New York City that are designed the way buildings were before 1940.

-- "Robert A.M. Stern Is Still Dreaming of a Fresh New York," New York Times

His new book, 1500 pages!, covers new projects in the 21st century.  It's not limited to Manhattan, it discusses projects in all the boroughs.

Paris ("A City Reinvented: Paris Is Now Greater Paris", New York Times).  Focuses on urban design and quality of life improvements.

"Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class," NYT.  From the article:

For most of the park’s history, Disney was priced to welcome people across the income spectrum, embracing the motto “Everyone is a V.I.P.” In doing so, it created a shared American culture by providing the same experience to every guest. The family that pulled up in a new Cadillac stood in the same lines, ate the same food and rode the same rides as the family that arrived in a used Chevy. Back then, America’s large and thriving middle class was the focus of most companies’ efforts and firmly in the driver’s seat.

Disney’s ethos began to change in the 1990s as it increased its luxury offerings, but only after the economic shock of the pandemic did the company seem to more fully abandon any pretense of being a middle-class institution. A Disney vacation today is “for the top 20 percent of American households — really, if I’m honest, maybe the top 10 percent or 5 percent,” said Len Testa, a computer scientist whose “Unofficial Guide” books and website Touring Plans offer advice on how to manage crowds and minimize waiting in line. “Disney positions itself as the all-American vacation. The irony is that most Americans can’t afford it.”

That middle class has so eroded in size and in purchasing power — and the wealth of our top earners has so exploded — that America’s most important market today is its affluent. As more companies tailor their offerings to the top, the experiences we once shared are increasingly differentiated by how much we have.

Data is part of what’s driving this shift. The rise of the internet, the algorithm, the smartphone and now artificial intelligence are giving corporations the tools to target the fast-growing masses of high-net-worth Americans with increasing ease. As a management consultant, I’ve worked with dozens of companies making this very transition. Many of our biggest private institutions are now focused on selling the privileged a markedly better experience, leaving everyone else to either give up — or fight to keep up.

Statecraft interview with Maria Torres-Diaz, "How to run New York City." She worked in the Bloomberg, DeBlasio, and Adams administrations, ending up as Deputy Mayor under Adams.

I learned from each of the mayors. From the Bloomberg administration, the use of data — the importance of answering, “What is the best solution to this problem?” before you start trying to triangulate and solve for politics — was a very early and useful lesson. The need to build the right teams: one of the most important assets that any senior leader has in government is the team he or she is leading. If you create an environment where team members are empowered and trusted, where they can not just execute programs but also imagine how government can do its best work, then you create these “ride-or-die” teams. I knew every day that my life depended on the strength of the teams that I was working with. Those were early lessons that I learned from Bloomberg: how to make sure you assemble, nurture, and empower the right people, with the right expertise, in the right formation, toward the right goals, at the right pace, to get done what needs to get done.

And

You have to identify the specific problems. You can have big goals, but you also need to think about those issues that affect individual people and families, and make no sense at all to the average New Yorker. It probably is infuriating and confounding that there are vacant units anywhere in New York given our housing crisis. Say you want to fix them, make a list, and they may not be the only problems to fix within an agency, but you’re clear about what you’re going to measure and focus on. Then get to fixing the underlying issues that are causing that problem.

So go about it methodically:

• What’s the funding situation? 
• What is needed in order to make the investment? Because it can’t all come from government. Do you have the right models that involve different parties, including the private sector, to stretch the public dollar? 
• Are you thinking as carefully and strategically as you need to about work and civil service rules? That’s the environment — it’s not going to go away. You have to understand where you can make changes that are feasible and will be impactful: where the juice will be worth the squeeze. 
•  Finally, how do you hold yourself accountable? How do you set a goal for the clearing of those units? Be clear about what your goal is, and tell New Yorkers how you did in that year towards that goal.

A review of Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World, "Reshaping the City: What does zoning reform have the power to change?," New York Review of Books. 

Mamdani leads a crowd across Brooklyn Bridge alongside Brad Lander, New York comptroller, left, and state attorney-general Letitia James, second from left © Adam Gray/Bloomberg

"New York Is Just the Start: How Mamdani’s Socialism Could Triumph Across the Country," Notus.  (Also see "What Zohran Mamdani Teaches Us About the Moral City," Time Magazine).

And for some critical mass of voters, it may actually be part of his appeal. A son of one of my friends, a young Brooklynite who works for an Amazon subsidiary, recently told me that New York City “has become unlivable for people who are not in a certain tax bracket. And so, I think democratic socialists speak to working-class New Yorkers in a way that I don’t feel other politicians are doing. And yeah, that has certainly resonated with me.” When I interviewed marchers at a recent “No Kings” rally in Queens, I heard, again and again, that people either approved of Mamdani’s democratic socialism or were not put off by it.

Clearly, something about the way people view socialism has changed dramatically since 1973. But why? And does this change portend bigger victories ahead for socialism in American politics? Democratic socialism’s success in New York over the past few months may, of course, prove to be an anomaly, one that could never translate to middle America. And yet there are good historical and demographic reasons to believe that eventually it might get a hearing outside the big metro centers and college towns — that Mamdani’s surge could, in fact, constitute an early step in a long march of socialism toward national political relevance.

 -- "Zip wires, darts, wild swimming: why shopping centres are trying new ways to bring in customers," Guardian

There was a time when the most active thing to do at a shopping centre was jostle to the front of the queue at Primark. These days, however, developers are bringing in sport and health-related activities from zip wires to cricket, football, rock climbing and even wild swimming to draw in consumers and use space no longer wanted by retailers.

While the trend for competitive socialising, such as crazy golf, darts or bowling is well established and gyms are commonplace in shopping centres, landlords are getting more creative and adventurous in the type of activity they are offering as they battle lacklustre interest in physical shopping.