It’s time for me to follow up on the post I wrote ten days ago in response to fellow planner and Substacker Bill Fulton’s "garlic knot" cities concept.
Here’s a quick summary. Fulton notes in his article that there are metro areas across the country anchored by core cities that have solid and successful downtowns surrounded by quickly rising close-to-downtown neighborhoods and growing suburban areas further out. However, many have struggling neighborhoods in between the downtown and suburbs, either awaiting the boom that revitalized downtown or becoming recognized as a great alternative to suburbia. Here’s how he put it, after being reminded of this while spending time in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor:
“Not all of Baltimore, of course, is like this. Like many older rust belt cities that have lost population – Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland – the suburbs are still growing and the center is getting very strong, but the old city neighborhoods are in rough shape. A mile away from where I was enjoying a high-amenity experience, people are trapped in neighborhoods of extreme poverty.
We used to call places like Baltimore and Detroit “donut cities,’ because there was nothing left in the center. But after decades of both public and private revitalization efforts, they’re not really donuts anymore. Some time ago, the Christian urbanist (no, that’s not an oxymoron) Aaron Renn called them “The New Donut,” but that term doesn’t quite fit either.
Instead, I’d call them Garlic Knot Cities – very dense and satisfying in the center, but the center is small and doesn’t have much of substance surrounding it.”
It’s an astute observation, and one I’ve noted as well (without any cool name for it). I think it stands out as one of the most pressing issues of urban planning, policy and governance today, yet it’s almost never framed in this way. There are loud voices in cities advocating for new housing, so housing becomes more affordable. Meanwhile, the machinery that has supported the growth of suburbia continues to build more on the periphery of metro areas. Sun Belt metros, particularly in Texas and Florida, remain locked in on the suburban model. The middle neighborhoods, unfortunately, get left out of the discussion.
Why is this? Mostly because that’s where a significant chunk of urban distress is housed in American cities. These are the areas noted for high crime, poor quality schools, abandoned or obsolete housing, limited access, lacking in amenities, few job opportunities and other ills that plague cities. Residents of these neighborhoods are often looking for the kind of substantial public investment that turned downtowns around, or the private investment that boosted neighborhoods that were once very similar to them into attractive hip hotspots.
But these neighborhoods inhabit a different space than the revitalized downtown and the still-growing suburbs. Back when the term “donut cities” did make sense, cities realized the importance of strengthening the center. In came the new stadiums, mixed-use developments, institutional expansions, and a new commercial ecosystem to support them. And it worked. As I mentioned earlier, the suburban model keeps chugging along, even in weak metro economies. Without the appeal of being a metro area’s showroom to the world, or a metro area’s next shiny new thing, those in between continue to lag.
Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.
Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.
Photo: A residential street view of a neighborhood in South Dallas. Few people associate neighborhoods like this with Dallas, choosing to focus on its revitalizing interior or booming outskirts. But neighborhoods like this exist there, and a big part of the Metroplex’s success is hiding this view from outsiders. Source: google maps.
