sprawlnation: SN: the author of the following coins the term ‘urban absorption’ to descr
sprawlnation: SN: the author of the following coins the term ‘urban absorption’ to describe urban renewal and and blight reduction when orchestrated by grassroots, citizen driven initiatives. The approach is simple in its earnestness. In a nutshell, don’t let vacant and/or blighted land remain without a purpose. Urban agriculture, parks, light industry, or even, counterintuitive to many new urbanism principles, parking lots, are more ideal than the cost of blight in real dollars and on the psyches of residents and visitors. (via Turning Around Urban Decline) What’s the best way for cities to deal with vacant and abandoned properties, which drag down neighborhood values and create a vicious cycle of poverty and deterioration?The usual answer for struggling cities is to bring in new jobs, grow the tax base, and gentrify poorer neighborhoods. The problem with that approach is that the poor people in those neighborhoods are inevitably pushed out, move somewhere else, and the cycle begins anew, said Justin Hollander, an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University.Cities “should have a diversity of types neighborhoods—but even in the poorest of poor neighborhoods, there is no need for there to be vacant lots and abandoned buildings,” said Hollander. He has previously done urban planning research in New Bedford, a small waterfront city in southeastern Massachusetts, and knows it takes a different approach to dealing with vacant and abandoned properties. In his latest book, An Ordinary City (Palgrave Macmillan), he explores in depth New Bedford’s approach, which he calls urban absorption.Property owners there bought up distressed neighboring properties, and reused them for everything from parking to urban gardens. The result was a turnaround. “It was not blight anymore—no drug dealers are going to set up shop and do their thing,” Hollander said.What was behind that transformation? “I wasn’t able to point to any specific city policy or initiative that said that we’re going to put this land back into reuse—it was really the decisions of thousands of individual landowners and investors,” he said. “The market was working; this land is valuable, people are reusing and repurposing it, taking a dense city and making it less dense.”Zoning regulations in many ways “are a big inhibitor of this kind of reabsorption,” in part because those rules are often counterproductive and difficult to change. In many residential neighborhoods, for instance, agricultural land use is forbidden. But if you have a large vacant lot, growing food in an urban farm makes far more sense than leaving a property unused. The cities, he said, can be active partners with property owners and neighborhood association to rescue abandoned properties.Another advantage of this approach is that it’s not gentrification: nobody is getting pushed out of their neighborhoods. “I think cities should be able to accommodate poor people and rich people and everyone in between,” said Hollander. “They should have a diversity of types of neighborhoods—but even in the poorest of poor neighborhoods, there is no need for there to be vacant lots and abandoned buildings.” Although this is not a new concept, the term “urban absorption” is interesting. This book sounds promising. -- source link