Urbia

Other people’s blogs

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

What to do with Route 81; why malls can’t ever be green; and reports of Buffalo’s demise.

Reasons for leaving Syracuse

Saturday, July 12th, 2008

The latest census enumerations show that the city of Syracuse’s population has fallen to a new low of 139,000. This, as Phil points out, leaves Syracuse dangerously close to “small city” status in New York. As a suburbanite, I think of “Syracuse” as the entire metro area, however. No doubt the metro […]

On being over

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Famous Architect Rem Koolhaas is disappointed with American cities:
“Don’t tell anyone… but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it.”
I live in Old America — the Northeast, the Rust Belt — and in decades to come, the rest of America will also […]

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

CNY ecoBlog takes a quick look at today’s bombshell that Syracuse is somehow the city with the worst “carbon footprint” in New York. Is Syracuse’s sprawl and highway addiction really worse than Buffalo’s or Rochester’s? C’mon. Despite sprawl without growth being a significant problem in Central New York, I can’t get my […]

The Westcott experiment

Friday, January 4th, 2008

Striking while the iron’s still hot.

How to move a city

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

What happens if nothing happens to I-81?

The unintentional community

Monday, September 17th, 2007

Sometimes it’s the strangest things that set me back toward one of the usual themes on this blog. (Please bear with me, as this has a bit of a long preamble.) Today it’s a somewhat huffy editorial in the NYT about generational bad behavior. The author of this editorial is outraged that […]