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

James Hepler jameshepler at yahoo.com
Mon Dec 12 11:28:11 EST 2005



--- Chris Rossi <nospam at spacelabstudio.com> wrote:

> 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. 

I see where you're coming from, but these structures
were huge, monolithic, and mall-like to begin with,
no?  I could be wrong, but I didn't think that they
demolished all the tobaccy warehouses and built new,
Epcot-style faux tobaccy warehouses in their place.

>   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


Good points all around.  Thanks!

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 



More information about the Ch-scene mailing list