There's good news for downtown Phoenix as 2009 gets underway, as light rail is meeting ridership expectations so far, even before ASU, Brophy, and Central High School students return to class. In addition, despite the gloomy economic times, downtown keeps adding more entertainment options as the Irish pub called the Turf Accountant gets ready to open its doors later this month. I also understand that Club Central, the midtown hip hop spot, is opening a branch at Second Avenue and Van Buren.
On the down side: the Boston Globe (at the very end of this story) speculates that sprawled-out cities like Phoenix have less potential then dense, urban places like London or Cambridge to develop intellectual breakthroughs, or even worse, pessimistic blogger Jon Talton calls Phoenix a "dead town walking" in the midst of the recession and housing market collapse.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
If you love cities you're going to have, at best, an ambivalent relationship to a place like Phoenix. For those of us who care about cities - mankind's greatest work of art - Phoenix is a challenge.
Positive thinking does not fundmentally address this challenge. Rather, it tends to blur meaning out of a well-intended effort to maintain the abstract possibility of improvement.
Decades of effort have done little to nothing to change our suburban form. Rather, Phoenix has kept growing out rather than up for the past six decades. Until now. The economic collapse will do something that we couldn't do. It will actually stop sprawl.
The problem is that metro Phoenix's primary industry is suburban sprawl. On the one hand, you need the jobs. On the other, the homebuilding industry is killing the place you love. There is not even a Hobson's choice here because we're not free to choose the outcome. Having failed to create a vital and sustainable city, we are completely at the mercy of external forces.
Talton's pessimism is borne out by the facts. Phoenix is failing virtually every urbanist measurement that exists. Creative photography can deceive us into thinking there's a vibrant city here. There is not. We are not going to bullshit others into believing our boosterish hopes. Pinning our hopes on restaurant openings and light rail fails the seriousness test.
We might as well be honest because there is no real conversation happening otherwise. Urbanists have no standing in Phoenix. Talton had to leave mostly for that reason. What remains is a city without a functional core or a business class interested in creating one. A city manager is not going to change our destiny anymore than we will with our best intentions. The spectacular crash we're staring at will change Phoenix by destroying it. As cruel as that sounds, continuity is worse.
walt, great to hear from you again. Excellent post and as always, I really appreciate the feedback.
As you can see from looking through the posts on this blog, I have no problem hammering Phoenix when it's appropriate. I lived in east coast cities for a decade and am cognizant of what Phoenix lacks. As an Arizona native, I also fully acknowledge the opportunities Phoenix missed-- and the desert swallowed up-- while the city concentrated for half a century on building a sea of suburbia and simultaneously suffocated its downtown.
That said, there is reason for an urbanist to be optimistic about Phoenix these days. A billion dollar-plus investment in transit infrastructure-- light rail-- finally opened after years of fighting the suburban naysayers. That by itself would be cause for celebration.
But beyond that, during the last half of this decade I believe downtown Phoenix turned a corner as real urban housing and entertainment options emerged amid what was previously a wasteland. Sure, taken in isolation it seems kind of lame to cite the opening of the Turf Accountant as a reason for optimism. But I didn't point out (partly because I feel like I've said it many times before) that it will join a growing cluster of other options, all within a square mile: seven restaurants, three bars, two boutiques, a spa and a bakery, not to mention too many galleries to count. And yeah, I know that would be a week's worth of developments in one neighborhood in Manhattan, but considering that not a single one of those things existed in 2004, and I think something significant is transpiring downtown.
Phoenix needs the brutal honesty of a Jon Talton or a walt. It needs a reality check when it clear cuts another downtown block or gives millions for the next lackluster suburban-style shopping mall it tries to wedge downtown. But when there is real, genuine progress that in my mind clearly passes the "seriousness test," we need to recognize that as well.
Post a Comment