urbanSTL

In his 20-plus years in office, Mayor Thomas M. Menino began as the healer of Boston’s neighborhoods. Over time, he morphed into the commander of downtown development. The best thing Menino did for architecture, the change he deserves to be remembered for, isn’t a building or group of buildings. It’s the transformation, still in progress, of Boston from a patchwork of semi-isolated neighborhoods into a single whole city.

The researchers found that participants who saw the video from the perspective of a car rated the actors higher on negative characteristics (threatening, unpleasant) than participants in the other three conditions. Participants who saw the video from the perspective of the pedestrian rated the actors higher on positive characteristics (considerate, well-educated) than those in the car condition.

These findings have a few interesting implications. For example, they may help explain the "war on cars" furor of the past several years. It's easy to imagine how some individuals, so married to their windshield perspective, could see any attempt to improve active or public transportation as a direct attack on their person. Those people on the street are so threatening and unpleasant, after all. Why should the city cater to people like that?

If the city’s new mayor gets his way, Central Brussels will soon be essentially car-free. Socialist Party mayor Yvan Mayeur, sworn in last month as mayor of the Brussels City district, wants to turn the Belgian capital's central axis into a pedestrian zone.

The move would transform a handsome but car-snarled four-lane boulevard and a string of squares into a long, café-filled promenade. This new zone will join up with an existing pedestrian zone in the narrow streets around the city's Grand Place and Rue Neuve, turning Brussels’ core into a spacious, rambling open-air living room.

The change is long overdue. No European capital has been quite so ruined by motor vehicles as Brussels, which even last year was scorned by the French as a "sewer for cars."

The transformation of the harbor from embarrassment to showcase is emblematic of the larger transformation of the city over the last quarter-century. “In the ’70s and ’80s, cities were thought to be dying, when high crime, out-migration and despair were the order of the day,” said Robert Sampson, an urban sociologist at Harvard. “But Boston has really blossomed,” he said, even as other cities have nose-dived.

If you want to … truly understand why our development approach is bankrupting us, just watch your speedometer. Anytime you are traveling between 30 and 50 miles per hour, you are basically in an area that is too slow to be efficient yet too fast to provide a framework for capturing a productive rate of return. Instead, they create hideous, inefficient, and disposable environments that quickly lose value.

I wanted something nobody wanted, something that was impossible. The city is filled with these structures, houses whose yellowy eyes seem to follow you. It would be only one house out of thousands, but I wanted to prove it could be done, prove that this American vision of torment could be built back into a home. I also decided I would do it the old-fashioned way, without grants or loans or the foundation money pouring into the city. I would work for everything that went into the house, because not everyone has access to those resources. I also wanted to prove to myself and my family I was a man. While they were building things, I had been writing poems.

After college, as my friends left Michigan for better opportunities, I was determined to help fix this broken, chaotic city by building my own home in the middle of it. I was 23 years old.

Eisenhower himself didn't realize the Interstate Highway System would cut through American cities until a few years after construction began. Ike had wanted a national road network like the one he'd seen in Germany during World War II. But he'd also wanted these roads to stop at the doorsteps of cities, not push right past...

The U.S. experience illustrates that national transportation planning is best conceived as two systems — one inter-metropolitan and one intra-metropolitan — and that the institutions, goals, methods, and financing instruments for those two systems should differ.

Hong Kong's per capita GDP is among the highest in the world. But it was once a worse mess than Detroit. Devastated by Japanese occupation, the British colony's population had declined from 1.6 million in 1941 to 600,000 by 1945. Then, after the 1949 communist victory on the mainland, a million refugees arrived. Most of them were penniless. Britain's Labor government was penniless, too. Maybe Hong Kong could have gone into Chapter 9. But who would have been the bankruptcy judge? Chairman Mao?