The NYTimes today has an article reporting that despite the much-heralded renaissance of the central city over the last decade or so, the “suburbs, however unloved by tastemakers and academics, remain where the growth is.”  I suspect that is probably a lot of truth to that.  But the basis of the story gives me reason to be skeptical. Applebome writes,

Joel Kotkin , a writer who specializes in demographic issues, says that the 2010 census figures show that during the past decade just 8.6 percent of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than a million people took place in city cores. The rest took place in the suburbs, which are home to more than 6 in 10 Americans.

This kind of statistical analysis raises a lot of questions, namely, how do you define “the suburbs” vs. “the central core”?  It can be a fairly arbitrary line that can be drawn to suit just about any conclusion you want to draw.  And the track record of Kotkin definitely skews towards suburbs boosterism.  Maybe he has a fair point, but at least as reported on by the brief Times piece, I don’t see enough to substantiate it.

For an example of just how subjective reporting on the cities vs. suburbs can be, Kaid Benfield has some salient points about Detroit, the supposedly “shrinking” city:

In 1970, 1,670,144 people lived within the city limits of Detroit. By 2010, that number had declined to 713,777, an astounding apparent loss of some 57 percent of the 1970 population. Recently, much has been made the 25 percent population decline over the last decade, from 2000 (951,270) to 2010.

But the extent to which Detroit is such a tragically “shrinking city” depends on your definition of “city.” The population of metropolitan Detroit—the jurisdictional inner city and its immediate suburbs—did decline from 1970 to 2010, but only from 4,490,902 to 4,296,250, a loss of only 4 percent. Big difference.

So then – what counts as “the city” when speaking of people’s revealed preference for buying a home?  The answer isn’t just subjective with regards to how you draw “the line” between city and suburb, but involves making quite a few complex and nuanced value judgements about what counts as a city.  And of course, Benfield’s analysis actually supports the idea that growth is happening in the suburbs, he just has a different opinion about whether that’s a good or bad thing.  He also has the benefit of some great maps to show exactly what he’s talking about…

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Just a quick note to plug a project I’m working on.  For the last several months I have been working as a volunteer with the Community Design Resource Center of Boston to help develop schematic landscape ideas for the Presentation School Foundation in Brighton.  It’s not a school anymore – it used to be a school, but since being shut down by the Catholic Church it has been reborn as a community center, which is going to include a preschool, community health services, and meeting space for neighborhood organizations. Last Thursday, the school broke ground in a ceremony with Mayor Menino and a couple hundred of our closest friends.  You can read more about the on-going project here and here.  We are having a community meeting to discuss landscape ideas on March 14th, and if you live in the area, you should come.  Check back at their website, or here, for more information soon.

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Today’s Boston Globe online has a slideshow of abandoned ideas for the Greenway, marking the decision of the YMCA of Greater Boston to abandon it’s plan to build along that strip of land.  This is just the latest in a series of deferred dreams and disappointments, already the subject of much civic navel-gazing about the real and perceived failures of the space left behind by the Big Dig.  I’m not quite as pessimistic about the greenway as some people.  Some parts, like the park by the North end, are actually quite nice.  But the other parts seem to highlight the enormous difficulties of crafting a good public space here – most of the abutting building forms and types had been created to accommodate an adjacent interstate, and simply removing the interstate wasn’t going to cause those building types to revert overnight.  But this is nothing new for any real city, where real change is something that takes decades and generations to accomplish, and goals are rarely achievable in a predictable, straight-forward fashion.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, Boston had just completed another huge infrastructure project which was supposed to have transformed the public realm – the damming of the Charles River.  The project had begun in 1894, and was the subject of intensive architectural studies of european cities, particularly Hamburg and its basin, and was meant to create, through a large public infrastructure project, both a sanitary improvement (by covering the polluted mudflats) and a new, elegant public realm centered around the river.  Looking out over the river today, one might complement the planners of this project on their success, but that success was anything but immediate.  In 1911, 17 years after the project had begun, Karl Haglund in “Inventing the Charles River” describes the following reaction to it:

The dam covered the mudflats along the river and stabilized the water level from Boston to Watertown.  As a public open space, however, many people declared the basin a failure.  ’It is, indeed, a wondrous picture – of still life.  The breathing space is there, plenty of it, the broad sheet of almost currentless water is there, but the people – where are they?  They are not there.’…Although the lower Charles was a ‘scenic and sanitary triumph, it failed to live up to expectations as a water park.’…For a number of Bostonians, the water park was a great disappointment.

What happened after that?  A lot of modifications, fixes, and muddling through.  A lot of unforeseen modifications, both good and bad, including the development by MIT, the creation of the esplanades, the creation of numerous highways that nearly decked and entire 1/2 mile stretch of the river, and most recently, the Big Dig itself and the Zakim bridge.  Similarly, the current state of the greenway shouldn’t be cause for despair.  It just means there is a lot more work to be done, and we can never know for sure where it all will take us.

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