The Future of Urban Development

Carol Coletta is president of CEOs for Cities and host/producer of the nationally syndicated public radio show, Smart City. Coletta is interviewing Richard Florida, author of "Who's Your City?".

I've been listening to Carol Coletta's Smart City radio show, a weekly public radio program, for more than a year. It's so informative that I archive each episode. During my interview with her last week, among the plethora of things we discussed was President-elect Barack Obama's infrastructure plans and the likelihood they'll be akin to a Works Project Administration (WPA) program. Her show the week of our interview just happened to be on that same subject.

But first, let's start with what makes Carol Coletta an international name in urban planning. Carol served as president of Coletta & Company, a Memphis-based consultancy that creates strategic community investment plans for major corporations. She's served as executive director of the Mayors' Institute on City Design – a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts – U.S. Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation. Carol was a Knight Fellow in Community Building for 2003 at the University of Miami School of Architecture and is currently a candidate for a Master of Design Methods at the Institute of Design at IIT. She is frequently interviewed as an expert on urban issues by national media and is an active speaker on the success formula for cities and creative communities.

Below is part two of my interview with Carol:

What are three characteristics smart cities share?

"They have a lot of talent. That is, human capital. They know how to attract it, keep it, and develop it. They have dense connections between people and resources and money. They also understand and act on their distinctiveness. They have strong vital cores."

Can you give me some examples?

"Chicago; Portland; Austin; San Francisco; Seattle and Boston."

Obama talks a lot about a major infrastructure initiative, which might employ some 3 million people. What will that entail? Will it proliferate car-centered development or encourage public transportation or perambulation? Will it lead to some sort of WPA programming?

"If the states drive the list of projects – the shovel-ready projects – it will be business as usual. These are new roads, new bridges. We don't need new capacity; we need to think beyond the system we've built for the last 50 years and say, 'Is that really 21st-century infrastructure?' (For Obama) the idea is to put people back to work. If the governors drive this, it's not going to be pretty. Read Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl's 'Transport Revolutions.' They pointed out that electricity is a carrier, it's not an output. You can create it with water, coal, nuclear, bio fuels... in many ways. We could retrofit autos and buses, etc. to use those alternative electricity sources. I think a WPA program would be terrific, but even that takes time to gear up, like the sustainable infrastructure plans.

Smart Growth America, (a nationwide coalition that promotes a better way to grow; protect farmland and open space; revitalize neighborhoods; keep housing affordable; and much much more) has provided good ideas for how to find the right workers and projects.... What you could do to put people to work really fast is to retrofit schools and government buildings. We could also retrofit residential buildings with funding from projected utility/energy savings. The Clinton Initiative [for example] worked to retrofit office buildings."

How will the recent real estate boom and its resulting economic woes help shape land planning and urban design?

"The notion that you can take any piece of land in America and build whatever the heck you want to on it is over. You can see it in increased transit use. People have more incentive to live closer in. Other means of transport won't be seen as a sacrifice but as a preference. People will rediscover the joys of real community and look for public transportation options, living more conveniently. The age of megamansions is dead. People will stop wanting to have so much space and so much storage and so much materialism. They say, 'Do I want a backyard or Millennium Park two blocks from my house? Millennium Park, thank you!'"

If you missed it, checkout part one of my interview with Carol Coletta.

View more blogs by Nichole Reber at Spacedesignjournal.com

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