Kill Off the Old City so New Cities Can Be Born - Tablet Magazine

Kill Off the Old City so New Cities Can Be Born - Tablet Magazine After decades of self-celebration and relentless media hype, the great “urban renaissance” predicted by the New Urbanists—a vision of cities built by and for the creative class—has come crashing down. Where the smart set once proclaimed that mayors should rule the world or that economic growth would increasingly cluster in a handful of super cities, now even The New York Times bleakly warns of an “urban doom loop.” The very impressive blocks of skyscrapers that housed many of the world’s leading corporations have gone from harbingers of the future to something resembling the abandoned factory towns of the Industrial Revolution. Transit systems critical to the old urban model are in free fall. In great cities like New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, criminals and the homeless, many of them mentally disturbed and unstable, lurk on the streets, in the parks, and in the stores. At the same time, residential neighborhoods in places like New York, Boston, and even much of San Francisco have retained their streetwise vitality. Since the pandemic, Brooklyn has experienced a resurgence of new businesses while Manhattan has seen large declines, particularly in its office-dependent retail sector. Additionally, a new and largely unheralded chapter of urbanity is being written in suburbs and exurbs as these areas, once derided as cultureless wastelands, are increasingly walkable and diverse, in some ways challenging the supremacy of traditional cities by becoming more like them. Even as urban centers struggle, their peripheries are flourishing. This is the emerging shape of today’s American urban landscape.