Just think: if I’d actually pursued a career in planning, I could have spent all my time coming up with grandiose schemes like this one, which will probably never come to pass (and probably never should)…
What is this fascination so many small and medium-size sunbelt cities have with downtown stadiums and “grand pedestrian plazas” with cutesy little concrete doodads? They’re just like those stupid “downtown mall” schemes which blocked off main steets by the hundreds in the 1970s and are now being ripped up all over the country after succeeding at little but turning Main Street into a giant shooting gallery…
And why is it that municipal governments, when faced with lots of colorful sketches of ideas which have failed miserably everywhere else they’ve been tried, always manage to convince themselves that their city is the one place in the whole country where the scheme will definitely work and will “save downtown”, as long as enough money is poured into it?
If people decide to return en masse to downtown Greensboro (or Charlotte or Fresno or wherever), it will be beacuse an interesting culture has developed there over time which provides something not available elsewhere. It will not be because of some grand city-financed “master plan” which redesigns everything and assigns it a cute little name. And spending a fortune to induce white suburbanites to use mass transit is just plain ridiculous in most cities of the south and the west; it’s never going to happen…
They’ve already rebuilt downtown Greensboro about three times since 1970. Strangely enough, its most prosperous times have been the years before and in between, when they just left everything the hell alone…
If this sounds like a rather conservative viewpoint, it’s not really. I don’t mind cities spending money. What I mind is cities spending money on complete idiocy…
