This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
What’s interesting about the article linked below is that it was written before the revitalization of America’s downtowns and the drop in urban crime in places like New York. From the standpoint of the late 1980s — Times Square had yet to be Disney-ified, Baltimore’s retro-downtown ballpark at Camden Yards hadn’t opened yet — things must have looked pretty bleak from the urban planner’s point of view (Joel Garreau’s Edge City came out in 1992).
All of which is to say that I think things are actually better right now. We’ve learned a lot in the past 20 years about the problems with sprawl — traffic, environmental stress, global warming, oil wars — and were slowly adjusting livnig and working patterns to adapt.