confused curmudeon gets it all wrong (was NOTICE: alarmist hits your inbox)

Chris Rossi nospam at spacelabstudio.com
Mon Dec 12 11:08:25 EST 2005


James Hepler wrote:
> 
> And who here has the balls to refuse to come out when
> The Wusses play that amphitheatre?
> 
For the record, this is completely hypothetical.  Bless James and his 
aggressive marketing.

As far as ATC, the thing that makes me uncomfortable about this style of 
development, is as much lip service as governments and developers pay to 
good old fashioned urban, mix used development, we end up with these 
monolothic structures.  Real urban space is a bunch of different 
buildings packed in close together all owned by different people.  These 
huge monolithic, mall-like structures just seem to be missing the point. 
  So on the one hand, developing downtown is good.  On the other hand, I 
don't know that this is what we really had in mind.  I think using the 
word "abhorrent" is hyperbole in this case, though.  They got it sort of 
right, but in this weirdly post-suburban white yuppie myopic kind of way.

Not that I have any clue how to get people to develop downtown in the 
right way.  Maybe having an ATC or two downtown will create the critical 
mass to kickstart an actual downtown.  I dunno.

Of course, I think there's a vague notion in people's minds that 
revitalizing downtown is somehow going to magically improve the lots of 
the people who already live there, rather than just moving them around. 
    It seems obvious that we're just going to be moving poor people 
around Durham again, but maybe it's not as obvious to everyone.

Back to work,
Chris




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