Listening to politicians and economists talk about the current crisis it is easy to see that most of them don’t get what is really going on. Most of them want to get back to the status quo of the last 20 years. Unfortunately that status quo evaporated in a blink of an eye, caused mainly by the fact that most of the development policies of this country from the last 50 years created an over inflated bubble that was built on the unsustainable idea of continued growth in the housing sector. As a real estate agent once told me, “Not everyone should own a house.” But the politicians needed to fuel that dream to get votes. Obama can only do so much when he is up against a congress of delusional egotists clinging on desperately to only what gets them re-elected.

American Grandstand – Bank Hearings

But what really got my eye was how Florida tied in Geography and Urban Planning to all this.

If there is one constant in the history of capitalist development, it is the ever-more-intensive use of space. Today, we need to begin making smarter use of both our urban spaces and the suburban rings that surround them—packing in more people, more affordably, while at the same time improving their quality of life. That means liberal zoning and building codes within cities to allow more residential development, more mixed-use development in suburbs and cities alike, the in-filling of suburban cores near rail links, new investment in rail, and congestion pricing for travel on our roads. Not everyone wants to live in city centers, and the suburbs are not about to disappear. But we can do a much better job of connecting suburbs to cities and to each other, and allowing regions to grow bigger and denser without losing their velocity.

The 21st century has just begun and already we are getting primed for a radical shift in the basic fabric of our society. Some changes will be fast and sudden (such as this economic crisis) and other will take a long time, probably an entire generation, to mature. As Florida says, cities are not going anywhere, but it will be interesting to see what happens to some Sun Belt cities in the next 50 years. Will Phoenix and Las Vegas be the new Detroit? Will the hundreds of acres of unsold homes decay and return to nature while the central cities that once spread out for forever shrink and condense? Given the history of redevelopment in places like Buffalo and Detroit it wouldn’t be surprising if the leaders of these newly decaying cities try the same tired redevelopment schemes that Rust Belt towns tried in the 1980s, most of which failed miserably.

The cities that will win and prosper in the 21st century will be the ones that see this economic crisis as a new beginning, a chance to throw out now obsolete building patterns of the 20th century and focus on planting the seeds for economic engines of the 21st. Cities do not need to grow outwards anymore, though there will still be an aversion to tall buildings in many places. The key is balance, a particular city needs to find out what densities work for it and lay the groundwork for rebuilding neighborhoods that are places rather than faceless subdivisions. Many inner cities are still bombed out moonscapes that need serious investment. People moved to the suburbs for space and in leaving the cities they created space by letting their old neighborhoods decay. These are the areas that need cultivation the most, the old rotting infrastructure should be torn down and new schools and roads and parks need to be built, but only where they need to be built.

Some places, such as suburban Phoenix don’t need new roads and schools to attract people. If the future of Sun Belt cities is anything like Rust Belt cities then the opposite approach is needed. Cities need to know when and how to contract, not grow. Drive from Albany, NY to Detroit and all you will see is mile after mile of depression. The cities you pass left their glory periods long ago and while it was worth while to try redevelopment, these places need to come out of their denial; they are not coming back. The land in these cities could be better used as parks or even urban farming rather than trying to build a new casino or convention center. Since most of these communities are poor to the level of 3rd world standards urban farming would be a fantastic way to get their citizens much needed fresh food while at the same time creating sustainable jobs.

This economic crisis is just the beginning of the rebirth of the American city.

With all that said, Twittervision is pretty sweet (although it is a colossal waste of time since I am not just watching where people are tweeting instead of studying for my German final tomorrow.) The geographer in me loves adding Twitter geodata to a map, but what I really find interesting is seeing where people are tweeting from, namely first world nations or nations that are pretty well off. I have yet to see a tweet from Africa, mostly just North America, Brazil, Europe, Japan, and Australia with a few outliers here and there (India). This just further enforces my feelings that these new toys are nothing more than that. Sorry you are starving and being oppressed, I am too busy fitting my thoughts into less than 140 characters.

Looking at people communicating around the world (and seeing people do it on a map gives you a great way to visualize the global connectivity of the internet) it may seem that we are breaking down communications barriers, but are we really? I’m not talking to these people and they aren’t talking to me. Mostly they are tweeting to their friends who probably live close to them. Do you really care that there is some dude in Perth who is bored tonight? What are you gonna do, tweet him back to go hang out? I don’t think so.

Also the fact that this post will be broadcast on my Twitter is not lost on me.

I am not an early riser. This, combined with going out every night, means that I have been missing a number of presentations I wanted to see, but I’m not concerned with this since I’m finding this whole conference a bit too academic for my tastes. I met up with my geographer friend Stef at the official conference party, complete with open bar and 80s cover band. When I got there everyone was standing around the dance floor, not dancing. At one point the singer said “Do geographers know how to party?” From the response the answer to that question is a definitive no.

I want to give a shout out to CJ Bright and Rebecca Alper. CJ did his presentation on the Silver Line BUS and seemed quite surprised when I dropped the bomb by telling him who I was. Rebecca did her presentation on property values in relation to the E branch street car of the Green Line verses the #39 bus. She found that property values were unaffected whether the transportation was via streetcar or bus. Interesting findings that may make people reevaluate the fight to bring back the Arborway trolley.

I left the conference and was about to go home when I realized it was an absolutely beautiful day out so I just started to wander. I checked out the construction site for the Columbus Center. What a clusterfuck that has been. I’m not going to go into now but lets just say they just dug everything up and it looks like it is going to stay dug up with nothing being built for a while. I wandered around the Back Bay, not really having any real place to go. I made my way into the Public Gardens and onto the Common. This was one of the first warm days this spring in Boston and everybody was out.

I met up with Stef and we got some food and ate it on the monument on the top of the hill in the Common. We were hemmed in on both sides by two separate groups of kids smoking pot so we left. I showed her Beacon Hill and where John Kerry lives. She is short so we took a bunch of pictures inside those crazy tiny doorways they used for coal deliveries back in the day and took pictures inside those Dickensian alleyways that are all over the Hill.

We then went to check out the Hurley Building, a Paul Rudolph building where parts of The Departed were filmed. This is one of the most amazing buildings in the world but lack of respect and investment are showing their signs. The concrete is falling apart and the plazas, which are used as parking, are in terrible shape. We got lost walking down a set of stairs that go nowhere and ran into a guy rolling a joint who gave us directions on how to get out of there. If weed is illegal you wouldn’t know it here.

We ended our trip through the Bulfinch Triangle. I love the old warehouses here. This area could totally be Boston’s TriBeCa (think about it, it is literally the Triangle Below Canal St, more so than TriBeCa in NYC) but its proximity to the Garden will probably forever relegate it to the domain of drunken Celtics and Bruins fans.

The first thing I noticed was how much the T had changed. When I left Boston in 2006 there was much to be desired. LCD signs that had never worked or would only ever tell you not to smoke, and station announcements that told you nothing about your next train, not that you could hear them in the first place. Welcome to the future, Boston, or at least at the Back Bay station, as you can imagine how surprised I was to see an LCD sign that worked and announcements that told you 1) if there were any delays AND why and 2) when a train was coming. Also there is mad signage about different bus lines you can connect to (which they always had but where hard to find), info on the new fares, and system maps that actually showed the current system, not the system in 1990. Way to go Dan G. The Charlie Card system is nice too, I had used it once before but this was back when it was only at a few stations which meant you had to buy a ticket AND a token.

I met up with Ian and went back to his apartment. I had only been through Jackson Sq once while riding my bike, maybe 5 years ago. I stopped to figure out where I was and kept moving. Centre St is a lot more cleaned up nowadays. I always knew JP was gentrifying but I didn’t imagine how much had changed since the last time I’d been though.

I had to work today at the Marriott in Copley Sq, stuffing bags for the conference for 8 hours. It sucked but I am now done volunteering (they only allowed you 8 hours) and now have the rest of the week to see and do what I wanted. If I was smarter I probably would have just hopped on the Orange Line and gone back to Ian’s place for a long nap, but I am not.

When I first went to college in Boston it was at Wentworth Institute of Technology which is located on Huntington Ave in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood. I didn’t so much love the school as I did the area. I have fond memories of walking around the Fens, going to parties on Mission Hill, and learning photography by taking pictures of the apartment buildings and old townhouses that are prevalent in the area. The place was originally built as an urban suburb for upper middle class Bostonians around the new Fenway, a park system that was ingeniously designed by Frederick Law Olmsted to store flood water from the Muddy River and Stony Brook. Like all posh neighborhoods everywhere, the upper middle class soon moved out to greener pastures, leaving the area to fall into decay. The thing that saved it was the multitude of colleges, universities, and institutions that call the Fenway home. Today almost all of these once fashionable dwellings are home to fraternities and dorms.

As I walked down Huntington from the Prudential Center I didn’t really notice anything new. The area around Northeastern was quiet with only a few students walking around. It was Sunday afternoon so I didn’t expect it to be the crazy hurricane of class-bound youth it usually is. One thing that did catch my eye was a new dorm that had been built right before I left WIT. I had seen it many times but this time it seemed smaller to me. How odd I thought. The MFA is currently constructing a new wing, which is always something that they were promoting when I lived next door to it but never thought they would actually raise the cash for. Apparently the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is too, which even though I lived across the street I have never been to. Mental note…

When I left WIT, the Institute was in the process of vastly expanding it’s campus, first by building a series of dorms, and then eventually a few new academic buildings. They had a dorm under construction when I left and I never got to see it completed. It looks really nice. It is post-modern and contextual with many small details that relate to the old apartment buildings in the area. I thought it was going to look cheap when I saw pictures but it fits in well.

Further up the street I noticed things starting to change. WIT had purchased two gas stations next to their dorms and demolished them. They occupy small triangular lots which will make any new buildings on them interesting by default. There used to be this funky little diner/bar on the corner of Longwood and Huntington that we always walked by on our way to parties/Stop & Shop. It had this great mural on it of I think a jazz performance, along with some graffiti. It added a little bit of urban flavor to the area, which was known for being one of the roughest places in Boston. This now is a newly refurbished office which you would think new if you had not seen the old building.

I remember this stretch of Huntington in my mind as almost noir, dark and dirty, a place we would go because they had liquor stores that usually didn’t card, vacant storefronts, and dark figures walking down the street that you tried to avoid making any kind of contact with. Today Brigham Circle is almost clean, and hip. New stores with neon colored signs line the street; new diners and pizza joints. The area was beginning to gentrify when I was there and it looks like the college kids finally took it over.

Further down the way things start to get a little dirty again, but not for long. New condos are going up and old apartments and triple-deckers are starting to go that way too. The low income housing development know as Back-of-the-Hill, an ugly 80s era brick monstrosity, is being redone in a very contemporary way, which in 20 years will be seen as a monstrosity once again.

I had forgotten how much I love Jamaica Plain. The way it sits on this hill above the Muddy River, the way the light hits the funky houses, the beautiful old triple-deckers and single family homes that the same upper-middle class moved to from areas like the Fenway when street cars allowed them to flee to the suburbs. The houses are cared for and the streets are quiet. JP was, in my mind, always hip. I used to come here for parties in high school, much like I got parties in Bushwick today, and both had that feeling of “sluming it”. I hadn’t walked through it since some time in 2003 when some friends in the Industrial Design program at WIT thought there was a hardware store there with some obscure supply we needed (IIRC they didn’t have it.) The area is very much like Medford or Arlington. There are areas where there are mansions as well, though I didn’t walk past them tonight.

I crested the hill as the sun was setting. I have become so accustomed to the strong light in New York City that I had forgotten how soft and special it can be on a quiet Sunday in Boston. It brought back memories of driving around with my dad, maybe out in Brookline or through Arlington, Medford, and even Revere. It was a comforting feeling, the light a light blue with yellow-orangey highlights on the slowly moving clouds. A storm was passing which in one direction looked dark gray but in the other looked pastel. There wasn’t much traffic and the amount that was there fell into the background as all the memories of walking down this same street, and of the many others, came rushing back. This is why I made this trip.