Borders, and the City.

My mother called me the other day to ask me if I still liked the music of Ari Hest. It seems his CD was on sale at the local Borders bookstore, which was going out of business. I didn't have the heart to tell her I mostly download my music, so I told her "no, but thank you". Then she went on to talk about how sad it was to her that they were closing the bookstore. She told me she had met someone while perusing the aisles who agreed with her that it was sad that Amazon.com was the preferred store for book purchases. "I like to walk the aisles, get a coffee, hold the books in my hand. I like to be surprised by what the store has to offer, or maybe run into someone I haven't seen in a while. You can't do that online!" she said.

I agreed with her and told her it was a sad reality of the direction our culture is moving, then we went on to talk about the Indians recent loss, and my dog Sammy's most recent interaction with a skunk. After I got off the phone, however, I realized something: Borders' story is not unlike that of Cleveland. You see, what I didn't notice at first was that my mom's description of her experience at the bookstore offers a fantastic parallel to the city.

When one visits the local bookstore they might have a particular book in mind, they show up and enter a space filled with various books, CDs, assorted art, and miscellaneous items. As you move through aisles you come to intersections where new topics and merchandise is on display often with signs and decorations calling for your attention. The space around you seems dense and filled, you feel surrounded and at the same time immersed in the space you occupy. There are people around you, neighbors and strangers alike, who can offer conversations, opinions on a book you pick up, or simply opportunities to people watch. The entire experience might include an espresso, an hour of reading the recent purchase, bumping into old friends or making a new one.

Pull up a chair. This faux-living room in a Borders brings strangers close together.

...and then there's the internet store. You arrive before you've left your home -- your individual space -- and use a search bar to locate the exact book or section you need. After a few clicks you've completed your task and can log off. Done. It's simple, sterile, and anti-social. But it's efficient, and that's exactly why it's the suburbs of book shopping.

His and Hers anti-social centers. You even order pizza online!

A suburbanite is like the internet shopper, getting up and using their individual transport to get the from bed to office efficiently, quickly, and without any opportunity to browse, mingle, or shop. The highways of cement and asphalt move consumers from point A to B as quickly as highways of broadband cable move you from buying a book to buying your groceries.

The book store aisles and intersections are the roads of our cities and the corner stores of of neighborhoods. That positive feeling people express when they hold a book in their hand or run into an old friend -- that's simply not possible on the internet, and it doesn't work that way in our sprawling new world.

Jane Jacobs best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), in an interview commented that the "corner store was just that... a store found at the corner. Of what? Of your neighborhood, of your community". But the suburbs are literally and figuratively communities without corners. Our main streets are often highways, and the 8 lane intersections surrounded by malls, gas stations and office parks do not make for corner stores.

Cities all over the world have active vibrant streets. Above: Varanasi, India

My mother will miss the book store, not because she won't have a place to go and buy books but, because she will be missing out on a place to see, meet, and talk to people. We need these connections in our lives and the city is a place where connections thrive.

The story of the Surface Lot

You get a parking lot! And you get a parking lot! And you get a parking lot! …man I love Oprah. But in all seriousness the way some of our nation’s downtowns look today one would think surface parking lots were being given away. Like an invasive species they have crept into the cityscape, expanding and taking over lot by lot, block by block, until entire neighborhoods consist of a sea of asphalt with an occasional island of structure.

So how did this happen? How did the surface lot become a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape? To understand this we must go back to the time before they ever existed, before the car.

Mainstreet used to be a real place, not just a nostalgic term used by politicians. Cities had grids of streets branching out from an original artery of commerce often named “Main Street”. The main form of transportation was by foot and thus homes and businesses were built as closely as possible. In this form the city was a dense grid of roads and businesses with no space dedicated to transportation. As streetcars became more affordable cities built lines into the roads and connected the various mainstreets to a network. This transportation system would allow cities to expand while maintaining dense land uses. People still wanted to be close to their work or at the very least close to transit stations, and as such areas of higher density built up along the transit routes and cities’ cores grew more dense and vibrant.

Public transportation is, in essence, the natural progression of movement in a city. Take for example a city in the mid-19^th century. Horses, at the time, were the individual’s form of transportation, however they were expensive and difficult to maintain in an urban environment. This is why we did not see open fields for tying up dozens of horses built alongside commercial buildings in New York or Chicago. When public transportation became possible it represented a new piece of society. Much like utilities and roads, street cars were a part of the built environment and were fixtures of the city’s infrastructure. They were available to everyone and facilitated movement between the jobs and homes of citizens. Cars offered a similar payoff, but with a much steeper cost. Every form of transportation requires roads; pedestrians, cyclists, bus riders, car drivers, and light rail riders all require that roads and paths exist between the elements of the city. However, cars required additional area to be allocated to the car and, thus, parking lots were born.

As the car became more popular companies saw a need for parking infrastructure and built single-use parking lots wherever possible. As the economies of cities continued to grow into the 1950s most cities cut their public transportation services and removed their light rail infrastructure allowing cars to take over as the main method of moving citizens. But as highways were paved through our cities the flow of goods and people moved just as easily into the city center as it did move away from it. Firms began building their offices further away from the city and people and industry fled. Many landlords saw their tenants leave and with little reason to suspect the economic circumstances to change for the better had to consider alternative uses for their land. At this point it’s important to note that cities often determine property taxes based on the value of the land which includes infrastructure whether or not it is vacant. As such there was a disincentive for landowners to maintain their buildings and many beautiful old buildings were demolished and lost forever because of this. The empty lots were easily turned into parking space and the abundant parking made for cheap rates and perpetuated the car culture. Lastly an empty lot poses a bigger challenge for redevelopment than an old building. Repairing and repurposing old warehouses and commercial buildings into lofts and unique commercial space is very trendy today and yields strong returns to investors. However, building a new structure from scratch is more costly and, of course, lends no historic value.

Without an efficient public transportation option the car became the best method of moving around, or more appropriately into and out of, the city. As such, parking lots became staples of the new city filling in every gap left by demolition. The avenues that used to be walled in by store fronts, apartments, and office buildings became host to vacant buildings and open lots; they were deserted at night.

Today many of America's downtowns are covered in patches of black asphalt and to lend insult to injury many of these empty blocks used to support historic buildings complete with architecture that we will likely never see again. This type of land use, the lowest density possible with only a single allowable purpose, is the antithesis of what a city needs. The patches hurt the walk-ability of a city by creating gaps in the streetscape that increase distances between points of interest. The further apart things are, the less likely people will be willing to go between them. This, in turn, inspires others to use cars and drive between these places. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that by making singular places more accessible by car we in turn become more reliant on the car to get us there.

This kind of feedback loop runs counter to those which make the city vibrant and energized and instead serve to expand sprawl and destroy the dense and complex fabric of an urban environment. Cities must take steps to mitigate the presence of surface lots. Parking garages must be encouraged whenever possible, public transportation options must be enhanced and expanded, and taxes must be revised as to not penalize landowners who maintain their vacant buildings. If we could simply restore the empty buildings throughout downtown Cleveland, the current interest developers have in re-purposed units would make them much more attractive than surface lots.

Like a web, the city requires all the strands and connections to maintain its strength. By slowly removing buildings we not only lose parts of the web, but lose the connections these places made. The loss of a bank, tailor, or department store hurts the residents who live nearby. The loss of those residents subsequently hurts other commercial ventures and the decay continues until the web falls to pieces.

Public transit systems enhance the flow of people within a city and amplify its energy. Personal transit systems expand the flow of people into, and subsequently out of, the city, and dampen its energy. The surface parking lot is a symptom of the disease of car culture, and the more you see in a cityscape the more troubled the story. If a city is a beautiful pattern of interwoven activities, the parking lot is a dramatic blemish on the fabric.

Order in Chaos

As with all pursuits it's important to understand what it is your looking for -- in this case, what is a city? This question would yield endless debate, and so I won't try to offer any definitive conclusions, but there are a few elements of the city that most could agree on.

The city is a collective. A place where various communities, economies, and human-ecosystems layer and connect. These dense system of inter-connectivity could be home to many million or many thousands, the number is not important. In my opinion it is the ordered chaos of interwoven purpose that typifies "the city".

The interwoven activities of people and enterprises form the city's fabric.

Thus, a healthy city is one that exhibits a vibrancy in these qualities. The synergies and positive feedback-loops created within a city act as a catalyst for even bigger and more vibrant activities. The ability for a city to magnify the lives and actions of its inhabitants is a central element to my research.

To revive Cleveland, we must first isolate the strengths of the city. Examining the corridors of infrastructure, rivers, avenues, railroads and highways lays a framework for how goods, services, and people move about the city. Before we can offer lofty dreams of light rail and streetcar networks, we must see if we are using our current assets properly. Determining which economic engines are true anchors of productivity in the city should be followed by aggressive public policy to enhance and support these institutions. Small businesses are the engines of innovation and can feed off the success of major industry. This is the kind of synergy that a city can offer. Lastly identifying the resilient communities that have outlasted the sprawl-and-flight history of the city can give policy makers insight into which communities could serve as hubs of future residential activities.

However, we must do more than look at the current strengths of the city, we must look backwards through history to watch the rise and, in all too many cases, fall of institutions within the city. Did we lose jobs to globalization? Did they become obsolete? Or did the CEO move the jobs just a few miles out into suburbia?

The revival of Cleveland would mean its return to national significance. The best way to do this is to determine what assets brought about its initial "boom" and see how many of them can be repaired. Add in the new and burgeoning strengths of the city (read: the Cleveland Clinic was not a 19th century economic powerhouse) and top off with a look to the future to find which areas Cleveland has never taken advantage of, but could.

The Cleveland Clinic was recently named the #4 Hospital in the U.S. by US News and World Report

There are global, national, regional and hyper-local economies that a city can tap into, but there are also limiting factors such as barriers to entry. Cleveland may never be able to compete with Palo Alto, CA in the technology category, but the biotechnology field is ripe for development. Currently Cambridge/Boston is the American Mecca for this kind of research, but Cleveland could certainly take on and excel in this sector.

The city is the collision of everything that man has made; it is chaos with a purpose. There is a gravity that pulls toward the City the culture and advancements of a society. Only in 20th Century America have we seen Newton's famous apple break from its branch, and fly up toward the heavens.

Pericles, a famous politician of Athens, made a speech at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War in honor of Athens' fallen soldiers. In the speech he said, "all good things flow into the City, because of its greatness." Cleveland is surrounded by and filled with assets that provide incredible opportunity for growth. The current and historic institutions yield a framework, that if nurtured, can bring the flow of people, businesses, and all good things back to it.

The Revival

Last week I went to the National Building Museum in downtown Washington, DC to hear a lecture on the Gothic revival in architecture. During the lecture I was paused, for a moment, by the speaker's characterization of the term "revival". She described a "revival" as the moment when something becomes popular or important again.

I have long been searching for the best way to describe what it is that I want for my hometown, the City of Cleveland. Some have framed the mission I take on as one to "save" the city; others criticize this goal as a reinvention that neglects the past. I believe that the right goal, the right mission, is that of revival. We need to bring Cleveland back to the level of importance it once held. During the first half of the 20^th Century it was the fifth largest city in the United States and home to industry, affluent society, and massive economic activity. We cannot achieve that by following the playbook of 19th century America, but we also cannot allow our city to tear apart it's heritage and past in order to stage its future. The challenge facing new-urbanists and the policymakers in our cities is to balance the needs of the present with the goals of tomorrow and the infrastructure of our past. This country no longer needs a city whose horizon is populated with smokestacks channeling out the heat and soot from steel mills. Instead, America needs creative problem-solving citizens: entrepreneurs who can create the 21st century's new jobs and engage their fellow citizens with a new purpose and niche to fill. Both Cleveland and the American City need a revival.

Recently, I came across a series of photographs of Cleveland from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The photos were from a forum of dedicated urbanists who love the city. Posts followed each photograph expressing a sense of longing and, at times, anguish over seeing the glorious old images. One in particular showed the Warehouse District (WHD) of Cleveland, an area of roughly 50 acres just west of downtown's public square. The district was filled, block -by -block, with brick and stone warehouses, each with beautiful facades, window frames, doorways, and various other masonry details. On foot, one can only imagine that, the roads of the WHD offered dense and vibrant streetscapes. Its sidewalks were likely full of pedestrians, moving from offices to local coffee shops, dodging streetcars along the way.

Today the WHD is home to only a fraction of these buildings and more than half of the land has been converted into surface parking lots. The activity, vibrancy, and synergy of workers and residents has been lost to a veritable ocean of asphalt.

Above, the Warehouse District in 1940. Today more than half the land is suface parking lots.

This is one of many stories that have impacted the social and economic landscape of Cleveland. Once, the fifth largest city in the United States, Cleveland now struggles with a shrinking population and the echoing repercussions of white flight, suburban sprawl, and of carving highways through and around the region.

But can the city come back? Over the last two decades, Cleveland has seen a variety of signs that its streets have yet to be drained completely of life . Public-private partnerships have funded numerous large building projects, including three stadiums, the nationally renowned Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and a pioneering Convention Center/Medical Mart combo in the heart of the city, which is currently under construction. Shift to a higher powered lens and you'll see smaller, but possibly more important, projects underway. Developers have energized a corridor known as East Fourth into one of the top entertainment areas in downtown while hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into various projects around the University Circle, or Uptown, neighborhood.

But a full scale revival of Cleveland is far from upon us. The institutions that can perpetuate, or destroy, the energy of a city are manifold and they must be examined individually but understood holistically as well.

So this blog, in brief, is going to be a history of the things I learn while searching for keys to the revival of my hometown. I'll be posting various notes and findings from books on infrastructure, finance, economic development, urban planning, architecture, and just about everything else you can imagine. Though I don't expect to find a panacea for the city, I do believe that best practices exist, and by pulling together various notes and looking for synergies, I expect to find answers to my questions.

No, that's not New York City. Above, Euclid Avenue in the early 20th century.

Cities are imperfect. They are organic centers of human development and are able to magnify our greatest successes as well as our most horrifying failures. They are the peak of human achievement and represent a possibility that is only real when society comes together. Cleveland's story is not unique. The advent of the car and the age of highways and suburbia has taken its toll on every major city in the United States, but the oldest and most storied successes of America lie in the rust belt cities that, today, barely echo their former glory. A revival of their downtowns and city centers would bring about a return to the city, an economic boost that would generate the innovation and creative entrepreneurship this country needs. The pulse of life in the streets of a city can be felt throughout its entire region, and the successes of that city are reflected in the quality of life and quantity of opportunity for its citizens.

Cleveland's revival could be America's revival. So let's begin...