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Saturday, June 27, 2015

Driverless Cars

This piece on driverless cars in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (http://www.startribune.com/streetscapes-driverless-cars-will-have-big-impact-on-city-streets/306282691/) garnered a lot of discussion that may be more informative than the article itself. I am not surprised by the reaction of people who defend their right to drive cars; the same kind of reactions occurred, as I write in the piece, when cars began to usurp horse-drawn vehicles over a hundred years ago. But the way in which some people simply dismiss the fact of driverless cars or shoot the messenger bringing them this news shows how at least part of the reading public lives either in a fact-free world or chooses to ignore facts that make them uncomfortable. As James Schlesinger is attributed to have said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." 

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Discovering Sites

One of the ways to think about the work of the MDC is as a place that helps communities discover sites they didn't know they had. The work we have done on covering depressed highways with green "lids" that create open space above the highway roadbed and development opportunities on the adjacent land is one example of that. We are also looking at how communities - from municipalities to entire counties - can better utilize the underused public lands that they control for everything from eco-services to affordable housing development to new kinds of mixed-use complexes to improve the social, environmental, and economic health of a place. There are so many sites to discover right in front of us, and the MDC hopes to reveal as many of them as possible.

Monday, June 15, 2015

Building the 21st Century City

On this, my first day as the Director of the Metropolitan Design Center (MDC), I thought I’d start with what I see as the Center’s tagline: Building the 21st Century City. That may seem obvious, since the Center focuses on city building and the 21st Century began 15 years ago, but too many cities – including many in the Twin Cities metro area – continue to build based on the rules and assumptions of the last century. Too many municipalities continue to assume that they will thrive with the low-density development, over-extended infrastructure, and single-use zoning that has characterized city building since World War II. In fact, that pattern of development far exceeds our ability to maintain it economically, as well as socially and environmentally. The MDC has the goal of helping cities rethink the assumptions and rewrite the rules guiding development so that we create metropolitan areas that we can afford economically, sustain environmentally, and justify ethically to future generations.
Tom Fisher