Next City - Forefront

The Unlikely Ascent of Palestine’s Green Architects

Joseph Dana — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:00:58 +0000

Amid a stalled peace progress and an increasingly hopeless political atmosphere, a growing number of young Palestinians are betting that they can design their way into a better future. In Ramallah, the de-facto Palestinian capital, young designers are making furniture out of trash in hopes of reducing landfill waste while increasing their country’s self-reliance. In East Jerusalem, Jews and Palestinians are working together to provide basic services to a Jerusalem neighborhood that ended up on the wrong side of the Israeli separation barriers. In villages across the region, people are working to preserve and reintroduce life to traditional Arab villages, even as the country begins its first stab at a planned California-style development. Middle-East based journalist Joseph Dana talks to these proactive architects and designers to find out how Palestine’s unlikely sustainability movement came into being — and where it is likely to go.

Has Atlantic City Reached the End?

Jake Blumgart — Mon, 06 May 2013 11:00:27 +0000

Atlantic City casinos withstood the pounding winds and rain when Hurricane Sandy hit last fall. Much of the rest of the resort city did not. It was an incident symbolic of the stratification that has persisted since New Jersey legalized gambling in 1976, when fortress-like gaming complexes started rising above the Boardwalk as the city outside faltered. But lately, even the once-lucrative seaside casino industry is hurting: Profits have fallen since nearby Pennsylvania jumped on the gaming bandwagon in 2006, while a sleek and highly anticipated Revel Casino has proven a spectacular failure. As Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie trade barbs, everyone from executives to cocktail servers say that the gambling mecca needs to diversify if is to survive. Examining the politics and economics that have AC staring down disaster on all fronts, Jake Blumgart weighs the odds of a second — or third — chance for America’s Favorite Playground.

แผนรับมือภัยพิบัติที่ทำด้วยตัวเอง

Dustin Roasa — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:22:33 +0000

อุทกภัยปี 2554 ในกรุงเทพฯ เป็นภัยพิบัติทางธรรมชาติที่ร้ายแรงที่สุดในประวัติศาสตร์ของไทย แต่ผลจากอุทกภัยครั้งนี้อาจเลวร้ายกว่านี้ หากเครือข่ายสังคมไม่เป็นทางการในระดับชุมชนไม่ได้ระดมพลอย่างรวดเร็วเพื่อดำเนินการตอบสนองต่อภัยพิบัติครั้งนั้นด้วยตนเอง ดัสติน โรซา รายงานจากกรุงเทพฯ เพื่อบอกเล่าเรื่องราวของชุมชนหนึ่งที่ถูดตัดขาดออกจากโลกภายนอกเพราะถูกน้ำท่วมอย่างหนัก แต่ชุมชนนี้กลับคิดหาวิธีการตอบสนองภัยพิบัติขึ้นมาเอง และการที่เมืองอื่นๆ กำลังเตรียมเครือข่ายไม่เป็นทางการของตัวเองขึ้นมาเพื่อรับมือกับมหาพายุต่างๆ

The D.I.Y. Disaster Plan

Dustin Roasa — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:00:23 +0000

The 2011 Bangkok floods were the worst natural disaster in Thai history. Hundreds died, millions were affected and the monetary toll reached the tens of billions. But the outcome could have been even worse had neighborhood-level informal social networks not quickly mobilized to carry out their own responses to the catastrophe. In cities like Bangkok, where government cannot always be counted on during times of crisis, these networks are crucial to people’s survival. But a growing body of research suggests such networks can benefit all cities — indeed, recent storms in New York and New Orleans have shown how important citizen-led response can be as sea levels rise and severe weather becomes more common. Dustin Roasa reports from Bangkok to recount the tale of how one neighborhood, isolated by the rising water, improvised its own disaster response, and how other cities are readying their own informal networks for the era of superstorms.

This special issue of Forefront is part of The Rockefeller Foundation’s Informal City Dialogues, a year-long collaboration with Next City exploring stories and insights from six rapidly urbanizing cities around the world.

Can “America’s Greenest City” Also Be a Shale Oil Powerhouse?

Patrick Kerkstra — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:00:47 +0000

The evidence of Philadelphia’s not-too-distant past as an industrial powerhouse is apparent to anyone who drives by its 14,000-acre oil refinery on the banks of the Schuylkill River. Less than a year ago, this sprawling complex, the oldest continuously running refinery in the country, was on the verge of shutting down. Now, it sees future promise in a recent shale gas boom in Southeastern Pennsylvania. The refinery could serve as the producer of materials used to support the growing industry and bring well-paying jobs to a metro area with a dearth of options for low-education workers. But the city’s manufacturing heyday is long gone, as the main drivers of the local economy now lie in education and medicine, while Mayor Michael Nutter has implemented the ambitious “Greenworks” plan in an effort to make Philly “the greenest city in America.” Longtime Philadelphia reporter and Next City Fellow Patrick Kerkstra sets out to see if clean, new 21-st century Philly has room anymore for dirty, old heavy industry.

Rahm Emanuel Has an Idea

Tim Logan — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 10:00:00 +0000

These days, a shadow in the shape of a parking meter hangs over every public-private deal in Chicago. Former mayor Richard Daley’s 2008 decision to lease the operation of city meters has largely been considered a boondoggle. Yet five years later, current Mayor Rahm Emanuel is about to embark on the most ambitious public-private endeavor in the country. The Chicago Infrastructure Trust, a non-profit agency, will court money from private investors to pay for public projects, on the understanding that city revenues will eventually provide for their returns. (The first effort: $101 million worth of energy retrofits to city-owned buildings.) This way, Chicago — a city with a general capital budget of less than $1 billion — can find the cash needed to, say, upgrade a decades-old power station while letting others shoulder the risks. Emanuel is confident that this time the city will not be left holding the bag on a bad deal. Journalist Tim Logan takes to the Windy City to better understand how the Trust will work and what its progress says about the future of public financing.

Separate and Unequal in D.C.

Dax-Devlon Ross — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:59:59 +0000

That Washington, D.C. no longer has a black majority is practically a forgone conclusion. The place hitherto known as Chocolate City has seen its African-American population dwindle every decade since the 1970s, even as it has, over the last 15 years, gained white residents big-time. Like most U.S. cities experiencing such demographic shifts, the people moving in generally have more money than those who were there before. What this means is that today, the nation’s capital is a staggeringly divided city, with greater income inequality than in any state in the country. The obvious catalyst is an ambitious economic development policy, reinforced by an expanding federal government, that has aggressively pursued newcomers while encouraging some of the fastest gentrification experienced in any U.S. city — and has in turn fostered a tense and sometimes hostile dynamic between “old” and “new” Washington. And yet, like any gentrification narrative that reduces the issue to a simple black-and-white equation, the reality is far more complex. Writer and District native Dax-Devlon Ross returns to his hometown to dive below the surface-level conflict and find out what’s really in store for the future of D.C. (or C.C.)

A Chicago Park Learns from New York’s High Line

David Lepeska — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:00:50 +0000

There’s no denying that the High Line, New York City’s famed elevated park, has captured the imagination of planners, designers and local leaders everywhere. Parks are suddenly big business. But might the High Line be too seductive? It’s not hard to imagine revitalization-hungry officials around the world spending as much as $1 billion in the coming years aping the crown jewel of 21st-century New York, and largely failing to make the return on their enormous investments. Yet as Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia and other cities prepare to turn their own derelict railroad corridors into green space, these cities are developing new strategies for building parks in the sky. Journalist David Lepeska climbs the trestles, talks to the insiders and tries to uncover how to convert aging infrastructure to best serve the future.

Welcome to Winnipeg, Now Don’t Move

Nancy Scola — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:00:15 +0000

What draws immigrants to a certain city in their adopted country? For years it was family, a job or circle of acquaintances from back home who could help a new arrival settle in. But over the last 15 years, more and more immigrants to Canada are settling in places based on a stipulation in their visas. Provincial Nominee Programs, which began in Manitoba in 1996 and have since spread all around Canada, promises to fast-track applications for residency — so long as the immigrant in question offers a plan for setting in the given province and helping it grow. It’s the sort of idea that draws skepticism in the U.S. when, say, a high-profile mayor suggests applying it to distressed cities eager for new residents. But does Canada’s province-based approach to immigration offer a blueprint for state-based, or even city-based, immigration in the U.S.? Is this a way forward that could allow cities eager to welcome more immigrants — places like Baltimore, Detroit and Chicago — to do that while other cities could choose to maintain the status quo? Talking with immigrants in Manitoba’s program (the “crowning jewel of the PNPs”) as well as experts on both sides of the border, journalist Nancy Scola sets out to see if place-based visas could be a solution for the messy fight over immigration.

Unnatural Gas

Sarah Goodyear — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 11:00:23 +0000

What would you do if you realized that someone had illegally dumped millions of gallons of chemical-laced wastewater into storm drains on your street? That’s what residents of Youngstown, Ohio had to ask themselves when one energy company thought to dispose of the leftover brine from its nearby fracking operations in the city’s sewer system. The issue of hydraulic fracturing has sparked debates across the U.S., usually pitting those opposed to the practice’s environmental implications against those who see it as a major job creator. The debate has touched Youngstown literally, though, given that at least 11 recent earthquakes in the region have been traced back to injection wells — another way fracking companies dispose of their waste. And yet, with one factory expanding specifically to accommodate demand for pipes used in fracking, the potential economic benefit for this struggling industrial city can’t be ignored. Talking to city leaders, activists and local boosters, journalist Sarah Goodyear tries to find out if all the digging is worth it.

The Infrastructure Promise

Dayo Olopade — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:00:44 +0000

Last year the heads of three East African countries journeyed to a small village of Lamu, on Kenya’s northern coast. They were there to commemorate the beginning of the Lamu Port South Sudan Ethiopia Transit (or LAPSSET), a 1,700-mile infrastructure project that would stretch an oil pipeline, rail and roads from the fishing village all the way through Ethiopia and South Sudan. For the assembled political leaders, LAPSSET was test case for infrastructure spending as an economic development tool in 21st-century East Africa. But one year in, Lamu residents still view the project as an effort to marginalize Kenya’s ethnic and religious minority. Meanwhile, South Sudan can’t wait for the onrush of oil, as it expects to slip back into an oil feud with its northern neighbor at any time. Next City and German Marshall Fund International Fellow Dayo Olopade explores the issues at play, from one side of the pipeline to the other, in an effort to find out what it will do to this fast-urbanizing part of the world.

L.A. Confidential

Nate Berg — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:00:02 +0000

The Los Angeles River has something of a forsaken past. For decades, the federal government considered it a piece of infrastructure no different than a sewage grate, and most people only knew it as the dirty concrete half-pipe that occasionally appeared in Hollywood movies as a symbol of L.A.‘s artifice. But thanks a coalition of activists and their various efforts to call attention to the river, this 51-mile natural resource — the very thing that attracted settlers to the region in the first place — has finally earned back some visibility. The EPA gave it legitimacy as an actual river three years ago, thanks to this fierce coalition of environmentalists, urban adventurers and residents. Now, the grassroots vision of a people’s waterway has become official city policy. Los Angeles-based writer Nate Berg looks back at the history of the river, from its role in turning Southern California into an agricultural mecca 150 years ago to 20th-century proposals to build freeways on its riverbed, to find how its unlikely rebirth came about.

Dreams Deferred

Sarah Carr — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 11:00:54 +0000

In the course of writing a book, Hope Against Hope, on the New Orleans school system, Sarah Carr didn’t think she would end up dwelling so much on gun violence. But she soon realized that, in a city where 35 people under age 21 were murdered last year (with the youngest victim only two months old), it was a subject she couldn’t avoid. Violence, and the damage it does to families and communities, became a major theme in Carr’s book, which Bloomsbury Press released in February. Here, you can read an excerpt from Hope Against Hope, adapted from a chapter on the murder of a popular teenage alumnus at a local charter school. Turning a descriptive eye to everything from football games to the charter school debate to a principal coping with the deaths of her students, Carr dives deep into a problem that touches thousands of New Orleanians every day.

Selling Low, Building High

Dan Rosenblum — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 11:00:25 +0000

Most of us have heard plenty about Atlantic Yards, developer Bruce Ratner’s ongoing Brooklyn megaproject that houses the new home for the Nets basketball team and 16 planned high-rise towers. But whatever became of the complex deal-making that made the immense development — the largest in the history of the borough — possible? Not long after Ratner and New York CIty Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans for this six-block stretch on Atlantic Avenue, the developers and select community groups forged a very specific type of agreement: A community benefits agreement, or CBA, meant to assure that all the construction would result in a boon for the people who already called the neighborhood home. Now, with the first of the Atlantic Yards residential buildings beginning to rise, New York journalist Dan Rosenblum investigates what has come out of that much-heralded CBA. Through conversation with those community leaders who signed onto Ratner’s plan, Rosenblum offers new insight into how the project has — and hasn’t — been felt on the ground.

Waking the Sleeping Tiger

Joseph Dana — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 11:00:44 +0000

About two years have passed since protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square kicked off a revolution that toppled a dictatorship and sent ripples through not only Egypt, but the entire Arab world. With violence and political unrest continuing to reshape the built environment, ordinary Cairenes are rethinking the ways they interact with the changing urban landscape around them. As protesters, street vendors and government authorities battle over to whom public space belongs and what it may look like, people living in long-ignored informal settlements away from the city center have taken to building their own highway ramps and challenging long-accepted axioms of urban life. Meanwhile, the remnants of a Mubarak-era master plan threaten slum-dwellers along the Nile with forced evictions, while a filmmaking collective stirs community fervor by screening documentaries on walls all over Cairo. From downtown street battles to cafés in the distant 20th Street neighborhood, Cairo-based journalist Joseph Dana finds out what’s in store for the future of the city of a thousand minarets.

Downtown Roulette

Anna Clark — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:00:57 +0000

A decade ago, only 11 states allowed allows casinos within their borders. Today, that number has risen to 24, with an additional dozen hosting casinos on Native American land. With the fiscal cliff and other threats to financial stability looming over local governments, it’s likely that number will grow even higher. And when it does, cities will bear disproportionate impact as most commercial casinos locate in metropolitan centers. Last year, after Ohio became the latest state to legalize casino gambling, its first gaming complex opened in downtown Cleveland. Casinos in Toledo and Columbus appeared soon thereafter, and another is slated for Cincinnati. But will these glitzy institutions deliver the new tax revenues that political and business leaders expect? And more generally, do casinos even belong in urban downtowns, especially those in search of a viable economic development strategy? Writer Anna Clark examines the casino industry, from these Ohio upstarts to longtime gambling haven Atlantic City, to find out.

Bringing It All Back Home

Anna Clark — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 11:00:40 +0000

Whether you call it onshoring or insourcing, the idea of bringing manufacturing jobs back to U.S. soil from overseas has become a political force to reckon with. Much of last year’s presidential campaign was dedicated to each candidate arguing over competition with China. But if the country will never return to its 20th-century heyday as a manufacturing powerhouse, what can happen at the local level to restore employment in places like Muskegon, Mich. or Lorain County, Ohio, where factories have emptied out and jobs have disappeared? With big companies like GM and small companies like Suarez Corporation Industries jumping on the wagon and promising thousands of jobs and billions of dollars for communities across the country, Michigan-based writer Anna Clark sets out to find out if and how “Made in the USA” can return. Examining the policies, partnerships and strategies that are successfully creating new manufacturing jobs in Muskegon, Lorain County and other mid-sized hubs, Clark offers new insight for those seeking to bring manufacturing back to their own city.

The Many Lives of Luz

Greg Scruggs — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 11:00:10 +0000

As the largest city in South America in a country only 25 years out of a military dictatorship, São Paulo is a global city in the midst of major transition. Nowhere is this more evident in the central neighborhoods of Santa Ifigênia and Luz, which contain an area the city has dubbed “Nova Luz” (New Light) and slated for a 45-block redevelopment project. Once home to wandering crack addicts, now filled with small wholesale businesses, immigrants, students and squatters, the neighborhoods are on track to get soaring office buildings and a massive cultural center. But underpinning this multibillion-dollar real estate deal are land use and development policies that could have implications for the entire city and beyond, setting a legal precedent that residents and activists contest will profit real estate developers at the expense of the neighborhood’s lower- and working-class population. Writer Greg Scruggs examines the issues as they play out in the streets and asks who will control the future of development in Brazil’s premier city?

Betting the Farm

David Lepeska — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 10:59:29 +0000

It’s no secret that urban agriculture is in vogue. Just witness the beehive colonies on Brooklyn rooftops and chicken coops advertised in Austin, Texas real estate listings. But as major urban farms such as the Milwaukee-based Growing Power gain new facilities, employees and glowing media attention, most have not yet figured out how to yield enough profit to become self-sustaining businesses — or, looking even further afield, to feed significant portions of their hometowns. Exploring large farming operations in three different cities, Chicago journalist David Lepeska asks the question: With all this demand and no sure way to scale, is urban agriculture facing an imminent bubble?

Parched Empire

Mark Bergen — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:00:03 +0000

Thanks to the IT industry, the neighborhood of Whitefield, on the fringe of Bangalore, India, went from being a nearly rural community to a sprawling edge city in a mere two decades. But along with the gated apartments and office complexes came a dearth of one basic resource: water. In fact, Bangalore as a whole is one of the only megacities on the planet without a body of water running through it. To make up for the scarce supply, residents turn to tankers operated by private water companies — or, as they’re known colloquially, “water mafias.” You can see their colorful tanker trucks in rich and poor areas alike, though prices can reach up to 16 times that of public water. Meanwhile, the borewells that dot the urban landscape continue to dry up. Will local leaders find a way to avert an impending water crisis? Exploring the economics and environmental issues at stake, Bangalore-based writer Mark Bergen asks how to quench the thirst of the world’s 18th largest city.