Future Here Now: Creating a Park That Might Actually Do What It Promised

Coming Soon

It’s no secret that I’m a cynic when it comes to the magic powers that urban design improvements are supposed to have in terms of impacting the community around them. I can show you dozens of streetscapes, parks, waterfronts and more that were supposed to transform the ills of the neighborhoods around them, simply by their mere presence. Often, the promised stores and businesses and residents never came - the improvements were lipstick on a still very troubled pig. In other cases, the improvements did attract new investment, but at the cost of a whole lot of unintended consequences — consequences that cost earlier residents their communities and businesses and homes.

In either case, the urban design usually doesn’t seem to live up to its promise. And worse, we repeat the same blunders over and over again, one city to the next, usually with very few lessons learned.

Which is why this article generated some actual guarded optimism for me. The 11th Street Bridge park under development…