Category: Speculation

Eminent domain, collective failure: Part 2, the company loses

20 November, 2009 (12:34) | Eminent domain, Kelo, Speculation | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
 
By: David A. Smith
 
Yesterday we encountered sad New London, Connecticut, whose expansionist dream has died with Pfizer’s announcement it is closing its plant and moving the jobs to nearby Groton.  Some, like The Washington Examiner, see in this a redemptive tale of brave and plucky small property owners standing athwart the [...]

Eminent domain, collective failure: Part 1, the city loses

19 November, 2009 (11:36) | Eminent domain, Kelo, Speculation | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
The soaring plans for New London’s revitalization finally died last week [November 11, 2009 – Ed.], and in failure’s aftermath the opponents of eminent domain for economic development (ED4ED) cannot resist gloating, as illustrated by this story in The Washington Examiner:
 
Pfizer deserts its monument to corporate welfare
 
No spin there, surely.
 

The little house [...]

Bring the city to the people

18 November, 2009 (11:53) | Cities, Global news, Infrastructure, Philippines, Slums, Speculation | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
“Either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water.”
– Noah Cross, Chinatown

 

“‘Course I’m respectable.  I’m old.”
 
Someday I’ll post in detail about Chinatown, because it (and its spiritual cousin, True Confessions) is a great film about housing development and municipal infrastructure, whose economic power did much to define [...]

The urban palimpsest: Part 4, writing the lessons

17 November, 2009 (11:55) | Cape Town, Formalization, MEEs, Networks, Saving Schemes, Slums, South Africa, Speculation | No comments

 [Continued from yesterday's Part 3 and the previous Part 1 and Part 2.]
  
By: David A. Smith
 
It’s taken three days’ worth of posting to describe the three days’ worth of disaster-recovery reblocking that occurred at Joe Slovo township in Cape Town, and like the reblocking, we weren’t quite done in that interval.  Now for the most [...]

The urban palimpsest: Part 3, building the grid

16 November, 2009 (11:07) | Cape Town, Formalization, MEEs, Networks, Saving Schemes, Slums, South Africa, Speculation | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the previous Part 1.]

 
By: David A. Smith
 
Within twenty-four hours of a fire that destroyed more than 5900 homes in the Cape Town informal settlement of Joe Slovo, more progress had been made in community redevelopment than had been accomplished in the previous fifteen years’ of confrontation.  The palimpsests had [...]