These post-COVID ideas for cities could be scaled down for Nawbany.

It's a British publication, and in some ways these ideas are scaled for cities much larger than Nawbany. 

At the same time, the guiding principles are intelligent and applicable, and could be scaled down to fit -- if we had anyone here in a position of authority who could read and assimilate information absent an expectation of cash-stuffed envelopes. 

Bike superhighways

Garden streets

A digitally enabled high street

Multipurpose neighborhoods

Unlikely in this god-awful stupid place, but a boy can dream pro bono.

From garden streets to bike highways: four ideas for post-Covid cities – visualised, by Chris Michael, Lydia McMullan and Frank Hulley-Jones (The Guardian) 

As the pandemic wreaks havoc on existing structures, we look at some visions for post-Covid cities – and how they hold up

There is a huge, looming, unanswerable question that overshadows our cities, like an elephant squatting in the central square. Will a Covid-19 vaccine or herd immunity return us to “normal”, or will we need to redesign our cities to accommodate a world in which close proximity to other people can kill you?

After an anxious summer in the northern hemisphere, during which those of us who were able to safely do so mimicked a kind of normality with limited socialising on patios and in gardens, winter is coming – and it will test the limits of our urban design. Regardless of whether we “solve” this latest coronavirus, humanity now knows how vulnerable we are to pandemics.

Can we mitigate the effects of the next great disease before it happens? And has the colossal disruption to the way we work and travel created a renewed impetus to organise cities in a more sustainable, more pleasant way?

We asked four architecture firms to share their visions of what cities should do, now, to better design everything from offices to streets to transport – and we have analysed each one – to help inoculate our cities against a disease that is proving so difficult to inoculate against in our bodies.

I Know I'm Not Wrong.

Aaron "Urbanophile" Renn moved back to Indiana (Indianapolis) from New York City earlier this year. This column was published a few months ago and is worth a read even if it is directed primarily as larger cities.

STORIED CITIES, by Aaron Renn (Comment)

The lost link between a city's forgotten history and its cultural potential.

It’s been widely observed that there’s an increasing sameness to cities today, a sort of neoliberal urban monoculture that’s swept the globe. Visit any city in the world and see the same boutique hotels, swank restaurants, outposts of global luxury brands, and so on.

Sameness ... even in smaller cities like ours.

It's what happens, utterly predictably, when the same old engineering and design firms with no connections to the cities, and no knowledge of their history and uniqueness, are hired to deploy their same old suburban template of design elements, generally a ludicrous collection of shopping mall motifs that somehow dazzle the barely-educated dullards who adfarm-near-me/">minister local political patronage programs.

For those cities who don’t understand their identity or have failed to believe in its value, it’s probably not too late. In some cases industrial knowledge may have been lost. But the local culture is surely still there in some form, even if it may need to be updated for today’s realities. Today’s younger urban dwellers, who see these cities in a very different light than their parents and grandparents did, are ideally suited to this task. They missed the collapse of the urban-crisis era. In many cases their cities are now showing nascent signs of rebirth, setting the stage for the rediscovery of these places as cities on a potentially upward trajectory again. The generation who left Egypt was unable to enter the promised land. Sometimes it takes a new generation to look anew and see the possibilities of a place. They perhaps will be the ones to rediscover the identity of a place, to look again at its history, culture, its traditions and rituals, to embrace the uniqueness of their city as their own.

Design Justice seeks to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture as a tool of oppression and sees it as an opportunity to envision radically just spaces centered on the liberation of disinherited communities.

Greg Fischer stopped reading after the first paragraph and went back to pretending he actually matters.

Do better than Fischer. Read the entire essay, and think about it.

America’s Cities Were Designed to Oppress, by Bryan Lee Jr. (City Lab)

Architects and planners have an obligation to protect health, safety and welfare through the spaces we design. As the George Floyd protests reveal, we’ve failed.

This moment is heartbreaking. Again. It is emotionally exhausting. Again. It is enraging to watch yet another black body plead not to be executed in public. Again.

There is nothing more representative of the state of and abuse of power in America than the scene that transpired in Washington, D.C. on Monday night: After watching U.S. cities erupt for days with pain and grief in response the police murder of George Floyd, President Donald Trump emerged from his White House bunker to forcibly remove clergy and tear-gas Black Lives Matter protesters — all in order to pose with a Bible in front of D.C.’s St. John’s Church. The Episcopal diocese oversees the 1815 structure and has expressed outrage at the action. It’s important to understand his intentions, as the president did all of this to marshal the physical architectural symbolism of the church to buttress his claims of moral, political, and racial authority. It was an escalation on the highest level, from the highest office.

For nearly every injustice in the world, there is an architecture that has been planned and designed to perpetuate it. That’s a key principle of the Design Justice movement, upon which I base my practice. Design Justice seeks to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture as a tool of oppression and sees it as an opportunity to envision radically just spaces centered on the liberation of disinherited communities ...

"We see a growing movement in cities throughout the world to stem the usage of cars and close streets to unmitigated traffic."

At the Modacity page at Facebook.

"My country is too big and spread out for bikes.”

A THIRD of all trips in America are one mile or less. HALF are three miles or less. The large majority are driven.

The potential for transformation is huge. But only if we stop making excuses and start making space for cycling.

We could be doing so much more in New Albany. But we're far too stupid and cowardly for that.

Why Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm, by Brooks Rainwater (CityLab)

In cities like New York, Paris, Rotterdam, and soon San Francisco, car-free streets are emerging amid a growing movement.

When asked what they like most about a city they have visited, almost no one answers: “The cars whizzing by on the streets.” Cultural attractions, the people we meet, walking through the city and gazing at plazas, buildings, and places—these are the things that make a city unique.

What if there was a way to get more of what we all like and less of the noise and congestion we don’t? Many cities are working towards that goal, by closing major streets to traffic and opening them up to people.

Cities have limited space, and how it is allocated is tremendously important for people. The denser a place, the dearer each square foot is. Yet all over the world, cities were retrofitted to accommodate cars, giving them an outsized portion of urban space and limiting the area in which people could walk, sit at cafes, or play games with friends.

Many cities in America are newer than those in other parts of the world; most were born before cars but expanded tremendously afterwards. This wasn’t the case in Europe, where centuries of settlement made it difficult for the continent to fully succumb to the automobile. In the postwar era, European cities could have followed America’s lead in designing around cars. Most, however, made very different choices.

The geometry of space shouldn’t favor one very large mode of transportation over others that need room to grow and flourish ...

“What are the best Urban Planning Books Of All-Time?”

Not one of the nine books. 

I'll willingly concede that I've read only two of the nine (Jeff Speck and Janette Sadik-Khan). It gives me something to aim for in the coming year, although I've already promised JT that we'd read Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Charles L. Marohn) in December.

The introduction follows.

You'll have to follow the link to see the list.

THE BEST URBAN PLANNING BOOKS OF ALL-TIME

“What are the best Urban Planning Books Of All-Time?” We looked at 186 of the top Urban Planning books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

The top 9 titles, all appearing on 3 or more “Best Urban Planning” book lists, are ranked below by how many lists they appear on. The remaining 175+ titles, as well as the lists we used are in alphabetical order at the bottom of the page.

Also, see our list on The Best Books About Living In The City.

Happy Scrolling!

In New Albany, Jeff Gahan still is "cowering before the demands of drivers," but "more and more cities are deciding to wrest control of their streets back from the tyranny of the automobile."

Thanks, B.

Jeff Speck devised a plan for downtown street grid reform. It was emasculated by Deaf Gahan's anointed and indemnified cleaver-wielding assassins at HWC Engineering. Gahan declared victory and moved to the next opportunity to bundle campaign finance.

In New Albany and Florida, bicyclists and pedestrians remain at risk when planners refuse the change car-centric nature of the street grid.

Jeff Gahan's de-Specked two-way street reversion led HWC Engineering to tack on bike and pedestrian infrastructure without changing the car-centric nature of the state's transportation planning.

Actually, almost all the biking infrastructure suggested by Speck was removed amid gleeful cheering by the irresolute likes of CM Greg Phipps (has he ever actually been on a bicycle?), but the analogy holds.

The two-way street grid project has not been transformative because Gahan didn't allow it to be ...

There's plenty of cowering and cowardice in New Albany. Maybe -- just maybe -- in 2019 we can start the process of changing the retrograde default into a paradigm that looks forward.

#FireGahan2019

Cars Are Ruining Our Cities, by Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey (New York Times)

(Mr. Gillis is working on a book about climate change. Mr. Harvey is the chief executive of the research firm Energy Innovation.)

SAN FRANCISCO — We might be living through a new age of miracles. Last month, Los Angeles decided against adding lanes to a freeway, an unexpected move in a city that has mistakenly thought for years that more lanes mean fewer traffic jams.

Shortly before that, Germany’s highest court ruled that diesel cars could be banned from city centers to clean up the air. Mind you, Germany is the land where diesel technology was invented ...

 ... As we write these words, we can sense the bile rising in some drivers. Americans have such a sense of entitlement about cars that any attempt to limit them can provoke a fight, as New York has discovered.

Yet the truth is that people who drive into a crowded city are imposing costs on others. They include not just reduced mobility for everyone and degraded public space, but serious health costs ...

The bottom line?

The bottom line is that the decision to turn our public streets so completely over to the automobile, as sensible as it might have seemed decades ago, nearly wrecked the quality of life in our cities.

"American cities are getting a little loosey-goosey with curb control, experimenting with policies that just might make the places more livable, for everyone."

Blocking handicapped parking
to light the Christmas tree.
Quintessential New Albany.

As it pertains to HWC Engineering's ham-fisted hatchet job on Jeff Speck's grid proposals, it would be interesting to know if any of the curbside issues discussed by Aarian Marshall in this article ever were allowed to intrude upon the "modernization" conversation.

If the conversation was initiated with Jeff Gahan, then the mayor's likely answer takes the form of another question:

"Uber? What's that?"

In New Albany, "modernization" means catching up to the year you graduated high school, just prior to trundling off to the 35th class reunion.

TO SEE THE FUTURE OF CITIES, WATCH THE CURB. YES, THE CURB, by Aarian Marshall (Wired)

... The battleground is ubiquitous but rarely merits a second look. In some places, it occupies mere inches of space. But the territory is now fertile soil, its coveters many. We are talking, of course, about the curb.

The curbside has always been a a place for walking and loitering. But in just the past decade, smartphone technology has enabled new transportation services, all of them looking for their own bit of the terrain. The curb is home to bike share programs and the cycling lanes that help their users get around safely. It’s a spot to pick up and drop off passengers (Uber, Lyft, Chariot, Via, public buses and streetcars, paratransit) and things (UPS, FedEx, Instacart, Postmates). Some cities have set aside space for carshare services (Zipcar, Maven), or scooter-shares (Scoot). Others have found new and creative ways to charge for parking spots, experimenting with tech that adjusts prices based on demand.

“Cities have started to rethink how their streets are designed from curb from curb,” says Matthew Roe, who directs street design initiatives for the National Association of City Transportation Officials and authored a new curbside management white paper released this week. “They’ve started to realize they need more tools to manage that valuable curbside space. It’s the most valuable space that a city owns and one of the most underutilized.”

What you do with the curb sets the tone for your whole city. And through this grey chunk of concrete, local governments are starting to communicate how they'll handle their entire transportation systems. Favor a system that asks citizens to share resources, by making room for, say a bikeshare program, and you say one thing. Favor private parking for residents, and you declare war: “When I think about curb, the first thing that comes to mind is how people react when you take away parking,” said Sarah Jones, the planning director for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. She was speaking at a surprisingly lively event about curbs, hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area research and advocacy organization SPUR this month. Residents complain, Jones said, of private interests taking over the space, but they don't seem to get that this is exactly what's been happening all along. “I’m not sure what is privatizing public space more than storing your vehicle in it," she said.

Charles Marohn on the "incremental approach to development."

How NOT to incremental it.

This week, Charles Marohn is discussing incrementalism. I'm not expecting this to be a focus for the incoming redevelopment/dishevelment director, so it's our job to bone up.

I’ve found that the most difficult thing for people to grasp about Strong Towns is our insistence on an incremental approach to development. I stress how we need to be making small investments over a broad area over a long period of time. I talk about the small bets our ancestors made when building places, how their approach fit with a complex world where we lack the ability to predict, project or even fully understand, after the fact, why one place succeeds and another fails. I show how the incremental approach results in places that are resilient, adaptable and – most incredibly – financially far more successful than our modern approach.

Here are the four parts of this week's series. Happy browsing.

THE POWER OF GROWING INCREMENTALLY

It is incrementally rising land values, combined with the ability to redevelop to something more intense, that naturally prompts the redevelopment of property in decline. Take away one of those two factors and redevelopment breaks down.

THE LITTLE HOUSE, A STORY OF INCREMENTALISM

It's the incremental nature of both the private and the public investments that made traditional cities strong, resilient and financially productive.

THE END OF INCREMENTALISM

Where improvement is not an option, stagnation and decline are all that remain.

THREE NEIGHBORHOODS IN ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

We have come up with many ways to explain the decline we see around us. In reality, we've simply given our cities no other option.

Cities may be able to curb the Mighty Trumpolini, but first, some unsightly trash.

Full disclosure: I'm linking to this article primarily because it's an excellent platform for this "take out the garbage" photo, sourced by the Green Mouse.

The article's pretty good, too.

Can Cities Counter the Power of President-Elect Donald Trump?, by Benjamin Barber (The Nation)

As the federal government turns toward nationalism, local governments will become crucial beacons of pluralism.

The new American reality suggests a very particular role for cities. The dominance of the Trump-brand of Republican party over all three branches of government renders the old balance of powers ineffective. Yet America’s cities and the networks they have forged with cities across the world—in bodies like the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, the US Conference of Mayors, EuroCities, and the new Global Parliament of Mayors—have the weight to contain, and push back against, power.

A pirate looks at '15: "In the U.S., Almost No One Votes in Local Elections."

I was a year ahead of my time, but that's okay. The point was made, posterity will be generous, and I can't thank Seven Percenters often enough.

In the U.S., Almost No One Votes in Local Elections, by Kriston Capps (City Lab)

... As if incredibly low voter turnout weren’t dispiriting enough, mayoral elections in the U.S. are also barely representative of the population. In the most recent mayoral elections across 50 U.S. cities, the median voter age was 57—evidence of an enormous gap in civic participation between retiring Baby Boomers and rising Millennials. Worse still, perhaps, voters are overrepresented in some neighborhoods and dramatically underrepresented in others.

A new report from Portland State University finds that almost nobody bothers to vote in mayoral U.S. elections. Those who do tend to be much older than the median resident and hail from more affluent neighborhoods to boot. That’s not necessarily a surprise, although the degree of disparity in local voting patterns is alarming.

"What we have to address now is making livable, healthy, safe, and sustainable cities," (Jan) Gehl says.

Photo credit. 

Go to the article for the details. As always, the point isn't so much that New Albany should embrace outright such ideas from the realm of larger cities. Rather, it's that until we begin thinking these thoughts, we'll be unable to borrow from these ideas and adapt them to make a great, smaller city.

5 Rules For Designing Great Cities, From Denmark's Star Urbanist, by Diana Budds (Fast Company)

Danish architect and urbanist Jan Gehl has spent decades making sure cities work for people, not the other way around. Here's how.

... "What we have to address now is making livable, healthy, safe, and sustainable cities," Gehl says. It's a topic he's written about in his books Cities for People and Life Between Buildings, and spoken about in The Human Scale, a documentary about his life's work. His research and theories have inspired a generation of planners and urbanists who are intent on reclaiming cities for people. On the heels of a recent lecture he gave at the Van Alen Institute in New York, we asked him about the most pressing urbanism problems of today and what he thinks the path forward should be.

1. STOP BUILDING "ARCHITECTURE FOR CHEAP GASOLINE."
2. MAKE PUBLIC LIFE THE DRIVER FOR URBAN DESIGN.
3. DESIGN FOR MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCES.
4. MAKE TRANSPORTATION MORE EQUITABLE.
5. BAN CARS.

The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, cultural policies, and the inevitability of dogs playing poker.

File under: "Not Here, Jack."

The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture is not a government agency, but an act of collective imagination fueled by all who believe that art and culture are among our most powerful and under-tapped resources for creating a more just, equitable, and vibrant world.

Specifically ...

USA: MIA (AGAIN) ON CULTURAL RIGHTS AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT, by Arlene Goldbard

Ed Carroll, a friend in Europe, sent me a query: “How come there was not one mayor in the USA that was prompted to submit an application to the Agenda 21 for culture? … The absence on the Map is quite extraordinary.”

My reply? “What a good question!”

“The map” is a graphic on the international award page for cities and regional and local governments that have adopted cultural policies “linking the values of culture (heritage, diversity, creativity and transmission of knowledge) with democratic governance, citizen participation and sustainable development.”

This time around, 83 cities and local governments submitted proposals. As you will see when you click on the map, not a single one came from the United States.

A discussion then broke out at Fb.

Roger A. Baylor
"Democratic governance, citizen participation and sustainable development” turn out to be such big sticking points.

Jeff Gillenwater
Yeah, but if we can just chop down a couple hundred more trees and subsidize a few more corporate boxes, it'll all work out.

RAB
We'll also have to take "values of culture (heritage, diversity, creativity and transmission of knowledge)" and hide them somewhere. If they ever got loose, boy -- would things get uncomfortable.

JG
I was thinking this morning, though, that our perpetual state of preferential lawlessness and economic pandering is, in many ways, not just honoring our cultural heritage but sustaining it. Was there ever a time in NA when that wasn't the dominant paradigm or that it was seriously challenged by a member of the political class?

RAB
That's a really good point. Just this morning I was chatting with an acquaintance, and we touched on this very phenomenon. Somewhere there's a successor to John "Guido" Mattingly, puppeteering behind the scenes; he or she controls Dickey and Gibson and Gahan, and the system purrs along as it always has. The best and brightest leave. The council takes public pride in all being from the same high school. The only idiot is me, for thinking there is something else there, when that something never actually appears.

"Highway engineers dominated the decision-making. They were trained to design without much consideration for how a highway might impact urban fabric."

If we retained the public transportation infrastructure we possessed 100 years ago, Bulldog fans could have taken the train to Indianapolis and back for last night's championship game.

This article makes at least two points that we should never tire of emphasizing.

First, that "gas taxes have never fully paid for highways," even though we insist on believing it's true.

Second, "An unmistakable part of the equation was the federally supported program of 'urban renewal,' in which lower-income urban communities — mostly African-American — were targeted for removal."

That's history, folks.

Highways gutted American cities. So why did they build them? by Joseph Stromberg (Vox)

... So why did cities help build the expressways that would so profoundly decimate them? The answer involves a mix of self-interested industry groups, design choices made by people far away, a lack of municipal foresight, and outright institutional racism.

Thursday Must Read Part 2: "Eleven signs a city will succeed" -- how does New Albany's score?

I'm happy the Bulldogs are doing so well, but these are the points that matter to the greatest number of people in terms of their lives, apart from games.

How does New Albany score?

I've snipped to the root, but go read the article, and comment here or at Facebook. I'm seeing three, maybe four.

Eleven Signs a City Will Succeed, by James Fallows (The Atlantic)

This article appears in the March print edition alongside the cover story, “Can America Put Itself Back Together?”—a summation of James and Deb Fallows’s 54,000-mile journey around America in a single-engine plane ...

By the time we had been to half a dozen cities, we had developed an informal checklist of the traits that distinguished a place where things seemed to work. These items are obviously different in nature, most of them are subjective, and some of them overlap. But if you tell us how a town measures up based on these standards, we can guess a lot of other things about it. In our experiences, these things were true of the cities, large or small, that were working best:

1. Divisive national politics seem a distant concern.
2. You can pick out the local patriots.
3. “Public-private partnerships” are real.
4. People know the civic story.
5. They have a downtown.
6. They are near a research university.
7. They have, and care about, a community college.
8. They have unusual schools.
9. They make themselves open.
10. They have big plans.
11. They have craft breweries.

The Baylor for Mayor meme, October 28: "The city is not the problem, it's the solution."

Jaime Lerner is famous for this quote, which all elected officials in New Albany should consider each morning when popping out of bed:

The city is not the problem, it's the solution.

For more reading: Common sense and the city: Jaime Lerner, Brazil's green revolutionary, at The Guardian.

It's this week: Strong Towns Conference and keynote speaker Charles Marohn, on cities, streets, and sprawl.

The Strong Towns Conference takes place in Louisville this week. I REALLY WANT TO GO, but I'm just not sure it can be done.

Crossing my fingers ...

First, a little about Charles Marohn, and information on the Strong Towns Conference. Then, one small but telling excerpt from the interview.

Ahead of Strong Towns Conference, Charles Marohn talks cities, streets, and the future of sprawl, by Branden Klayko (Broken Sidewalk)

The pattern of building more and more sprawl continues into the 21st century with potentially devastating economic implications to the well being of cities. Charles Marohn is a professional engineer in Minnesota who has been highlighting the problems with the way we design and build our cities today. To advocate for building prosperous cities, Marohn founded the nonprofit Strong Towns, with a mission “to support a model of development that allows America’s cities, towns, and neighborhoods to become financially strong and resilient.”

Marohn is the keynote at the Kentucky Heritage Council’s upcoming Strong Towns Conference, and we highly recommend attending. The two-day event takes place Thursday, September 24 and Friday, September 25 at the Kentucky Center for the Arts. Advance tickets cost $25 and tickets at the door are $35. The Heritage Council is partnering with Preservation Kentucky, Preservation Louisville, the Kentucky Main Street Program, and Friends of Kentucky Main Street. Additional support is provided by KHC member Nana Lampton and Hardscuffle Inc.

The excerpt:

What do we do with the existing network of sprawl that’s already been built?

Well, I’m going to paraphrase the Iowa department of transportation director, Paul Trombino, who said in June when I was there doing a lecture with him a lot of this stuff is just going to go away. We don’t have the money to maintain it. We don’t have the money to fix it. And it’s just not going to be maintained. It’s not going to be there. I think once you understand that in reality, that we’ve literally built more than we can possibly pay to fix, it opens up a whole other realm of thinking.

I think we need to start talking about how do we transition into a world where these things, from a market standpoint, start to go away. What we see now in a macro sense is an increase in suburban poverty and an increase in social isolation that goes along with that.

Millennials and boomers: "More faith in local governments and development than there is in Washington."

The sum total of poll findings in this instance? They want daily quality of life markers, not periodic circuses.

New Study Shows Boomers and Millennials Agree: Invest in Our Cities, by Bill Bradley (Next City)

A new study from the American Planning Association (APA) polled equal numbers of millennials and baby boomers to find what exactly they want in cities. And, well, despite what magazines tell you about how at odds these generations are, they largely agreed. They “want cities to focus less on recruiting new companies and more on investing in new transportation options, walkable communities, and making the area as attractive as possible.” Both generations also want municipalities to invest in education.

Delicious reading: "The Suburbs Made Us Fat."

Fat, but broke; Floyd County's skint again. Tell you what, Jim -- how 'bout us city folks keep paying double so you don't have to mention the "T" word to the tea drinkers?

Meanwhile ...

(thanks to K for the link)

The Suburbs Made Us Fat, by James Hamblin (Atlantic)

People in dense cities are thinner and have healthier hearts than people in sprawling subdivisions. New research says the secret is in the patterns of the streets.

... 68 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, which means that someone you know is overweight or obese. Most people don’t get the CDC’s minimum recommended amount of physical activity. Americans spend more time driving every year. So it is logical to conclude, as Garrick and Marshall do in their paper, “The role of the street network and how we put together the bones of our communities should not be overlooked as a potential contributing factor to health outcomes.”

They also found that wide streets with many lanes are associated with high rates of obesity and diabetes. That’s most likely indicative of, as Garrick and Marshall put it, “an inferior pedestrian environment.” Similarly, so-called “big box” stores in a neighborhood indicate poor walkability and are associated with 24.9 percent higher rates of diabetes and 13.7 percent higher rates of obesity.

Dense cities promote walking and biking, so the push for healthier cities fits with the vogue push for active lifestyles—as opposed to gym routines smattered across an indolent existence. Physical activity is not just concerted exercise time and deliberate recreation. It’s about ways of life. For some people, that’s best accomplished by making things inevitably more difficult on themselves in everyday life.

On urban progressive visions and our area's absence of same.

The Guardian's correspondent may or may not have the Chicago situation sussed, but he passes along a handful of astute observations as to cities as a laboratory for progressive change. Not that you'd notice any of it as a resident of the metropolitan Louisville area, which enjoys thinking of itself as something it isn't. More on that here:

Chart of the Week: The most liberal and conservative big cities, by Drew DeSilver (Pew Research Center)

Spoiler alert: Louisville, Indianapolis and Lexington ain't San Francisco, folks.

Tales of the cities: the progressive vision of urban America, by Gary Younge (Guardian)

 ... Public imagination when it comes to political geography is skewed. People think in terms of red and blue states, but the real distinction is between town and country. With just a handful of exceptions, every city of more than 500,000 inhabitants votes Democrat; in all of the 10 largest cities in America white people are a minority. More than two-thirds of Obama’s lead against Mitt Romney in 2012 came from the three largest US cities – New York, LA and Chicago, and their surrounding areas. It’s not difficult to see why. People come to cities to escape isolation and find opportunity. So cities become home to a disproportionately large number of gay and lesbian people, immigrants and religious minorities. To function they demand social tolerance and public investment for everything from transport to parks.

Shhh, you'll wake up John: "Noise reduction (as) part of the city planning process."

Imagine that: Slower traffic speeds to help reduce noise. Can someone tell John Rosenbarger? Hint: wait until he's finished laughing.

Slicker City: How Can We Make Cities Quieter? (fastcodesign.com)

Noisy traffic might be just as dangerous to public health as traffic accidents, according to a new report from researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Scientific evidence suggests that prolonged exposure to high noise levels are associated with loss of sleep, elevated blood pressure, increased heart rate, and heart attack, not to mention hearing loss.

So how do we make the world a quieter place? We could start by thinking about the acoustics of new buildings and street networks--in effect, making noise reduction part of the city planning process, the researchers say.