Abstract
The recent rise of Tactical Urbanism in North America is underpinned by four major trends and events: people moving back to the city, the Great Recession, the rapid rise of the Internet, and the growing disconnect between government and citizens. Taken together they expose the need for cities to not just reform how they work but to change the kind of work they are set up to perform. The cities that have begun to respond to these needs are already out ahead and have begun to define the evolution of the Next American City.
Although we haven’t yet realized it, our societies are on the cusp of a transformation as dramatic as the one the Athenians wrought when they decided to elect leaders instead of choosing them by birthright. We have a tremendous opportunity to reimagine the kind of society we want to live in and bring it into being.
– NICCO MELE
The End of Big
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Notes
- 1.
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- 2.
Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissman, “The Cheapest Generation,” August 22, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/the-cheapest-generation/309060/.
- 3.
Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak, “The Reasons for the Recent Decline in Young Driver Licensing in the U.S.,” University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, August 2013, http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/99124/102951.pdf.
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Robert Steuteville, “Millennials, Even Those with Children, Are Multimodal and Urban,” Better Cities and Towns, October 2, 2013, http://bettercities.net/article/millennials-even-those-children-are-multimodal-and-urban-20713.
- 5.
Nate Berg, “America’s Growing Urban Footprint,” City Lab, March 28, 2012, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/americas-growing-urban-footprint/1615/.
- 6.
Herbert Munschamp, “Architecture View: Can New Urbanism Find Room for the Old?” The New York Times, June 2, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/02/arts/architecture-view-can-new-urbanism-find-room-for-the-old.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.
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Jordan Weissman, “America’s Lost Decade Turns 12: Even the Rich Are Worse Off Than Before,” The Atlantic, September 17, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/americas-lost-decade-turns-12-even-the-rich-are-worse-off-than-before/279744/.
- 8.
Tony Schwartz, “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” The New York Times, February 9, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/relax-youll-be-more-productive.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
- 9.
Jed Kolko, “Home Prices Rising Faster in Cities Than in the Suburbs—Most of All in Gayborhoods,” Trulia Trends: Real Estate Data for the Rest of Us, June 25, 2013, http://trends.truliablog.com/2013/06/home-prices-rising-faster-in-cities/.
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Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (New York: Penguin, 2013), 188.
- 11.
Conor Dougherty and Robbie Whelan, “Cities Outpace Suburbs in Growth,” The Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304830704577493032619987956.
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“Suburban Poverty in the News,” Confronting Poverty in America, http://confrontingsuburbanpoverty.org/blog/.
- 13.
Emily Badger, “The Suburbanization of Poverty,” City Lab, May 20, 2013, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/05/suburbanization-poverty/5633/.
- 14.
Center for Neighborhood Technology, “Losing Ground: The Struggle of Moderate-Income Households to Afford the Rising Costs of Housing and Transportation,” October 2012, http://www.nhc.org/media/files/LosingGround_10_2012.pdf.
- 15.
Joshua Franzel, “The Great Recession, U.S. Local Governments, and e-Government Solutions,” PM Magazine 92, no. 8 (2010), http://webapps.icma.org/pm/9208/public/pmplus1.cfm?author=Joshua%20Franzel&title=The%20Great%20Recession%2C%20U.S.%20Local%20Governments%2C%20and%20e-Government%20Solutions.
- 16.
“Government Spending in the US,” http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/local_spending_2010USrn.
- 17.
Karen Thoreson and James H. Svara, “Award-Winning Local Government Innovations, 2008,” The Municipal Year Book 2009 (Washington, DC: ICMA).
- 18.
Richard Stallman, “On Hacking,” Richard Stallman’s personal site, http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html.
- 19.
Brian Davis, “On Broadway, Tactical Urbanism,” faslanyc: Speculative Histories, Landscapes and Instruments, and Latin American Landscape Architecture, June 6, 2010, http://faslanyc.blogspot.com/search/label/tactical%20urbanism.
- 20.
Emily Jarvis, “How Radical Connectivity Is Changing the Way Government Operates,” Govloop, May 10, 2013, http://www.govloop.com/profiles/blogshow-radical-connectivity-is-changing-the-way-gov-operates-plus-yo.
- 21.
“One of the top 12 trends for 2012 as named by the communications firm Euro RSCG Worldwide is that employees in the Gen Y, or millennial, demographic—those born between roughly 1982 and 1993—are overturning the traditional workday.” Dan Schwabel, “The Beginning of the End of the 9—5 Workday?” Time, December 21, 2011, http://business.time.com/2011/12/21/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-9-to-5-workday/#ixzz2lmQ6xJSM.
- 22.
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote about the Millennials in Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 and consider Millennials as being born between 1982 and 2004. The Pew Research Center places these dates at 1981–2000. Either way, these figures show that 48,977,000 workers are on the employment sheets, although the numbers may be skewed depending on how nontraditional work schedules fit into the data. Either way, employment as measured in the civilian labor force will not grow much over the next decade, meaning the Millennials will represent a larger piece of the employment pie. “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, February 12, 2014, http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat03.htm.
- 23.
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 166.
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“Raymond on Open Source,” New Learning: Transformational Designs for Pedagogy and Assessment, http://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/raymond-on-open-source.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Jeremy Rifkin, “The Rise of Anti-Capitalism,” The New York Times, March 15, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-anti-capitalism.html?_r=0.
- 27.
Joshua Franzel, “The Great Recession, U.S. Local Governments, and e-Government Solutions,” http://webapps.icma.org/pm/9208/public/pmplus1.cfm?author=Joshua%20Franzel&title=The%20Great%20Recession%2C%20U.S.%20Local%20Governments%2C%20and%20e-Government%20Solutions.
- 28.
“The workforce becomes increasingly urban, continuing a long trend, agriculture, which has under 4 million jobs or less than 3 percent of all employment, is projected to decline by 24,000 more jobs over the period 1996 to 2006.” “4—Workplace,” US Department of Labor, http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/herman/reports/futurework/report/chapter4/main.htm.
- 29.
“Millennials in Adulthood: Detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends,” Pew Research: Social & Demographic Trends, March 7, 2014, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/03/07/millennials-in-adulthood/.
- 30.
- 31.
Ioby, “Ioby Brings Neighborhood Projects to Life, Block by Block,” http://www.ioby.org/.
- 32.
Volodymyr V. Lysenko and Kevin C. Desouza, “Role of Internet-Based Information Flows and Technologies in Electoral Revolutions: The Case of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution,” First Monday 15, no. 9–6 (2010), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2992/2599.
- 33.
Pew Research Center, National Election Studies, Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, and CNN polls. From 1976 to 2010 the trend line represents a three-survey moving average. http://www.people-press.org/2013/10/18/trust-in-government-interactive/.
- 34.
Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina, eds., Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004).
- 35.
Second Regional Plan, Stanley B. Tankel, Boris Bushkarev, and William B. Shore, eds., Urban Design Manhattan: Regional Plan Association (New York: The Viking Press, 1969), http://library.rpa.org/pdf/RPA-Plan2-Urban-Design-Manhattan.pdf.
- 36.
Marc Santora, “City Gives the Garden’s Owners a Deadline on Penn Station,” The New York Times, May 23, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/nyregion/madison-square-garden-told-to-fix-penn-station-or-move-out.html.
- 37.
Ada Louise Huxtable, “Farewell to Penn Station,” The New York Times, October 30, 1963 (accessed 7/13/2010). (The editorial goes on to say that “we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed,” http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9407EFD8113DE63BBC4850DFB6678388679EDE). The Landmarks Preservation Commission was established in 1965 when Mayor Robert Wagner signed the local law creating the commission and giving it its power. The Landmarks Law was enacted in response to New Yorkers’ growing concern that important physical elements of the city’s history were being lost despite the fact that these buildings could be reused. Events such as the demolition of the architecturally distinguished Pennsylvania Station in 1963 increased public awareness of the need to protect the city’s architectural, historical, and cultural heritage. http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/html/about/about.shtml.
- 38.
Robert Moses once held 12 positions of power in New York City and New York State. For the biography, see Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975).
- 39.
Paul Davidoff, “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 31, no. 4 (1965): 331–338, https://www.planning.org/pas/memo/2007/mar/pdf/JAPA31No4.pdf.
- 40.
Adam Bednar, “Hampden’s DIY Crosswalks,” North Baltimore Patch, September 10, 2013, http://northbaltimore.patch.com/articles/hampden-s-diy-crosswalks.
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Lydon, M., Garcia, A. (2015). The Next American City and the Rise of Tactical Urbanism. In: Tactical Urbanism. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-567-0_3
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