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The Ratkovich Company in the News CITIES AS ADDICTS For Cities, It’s Time to Become Inner-Directed Urban Land – January 1992 By Wayne Ratkovich Those of us who care about American cities are experiencing a frustration that runs deeper than the current financial paralysis. Try as we may, we are having too little success building and rebuilding our cities. While each of us would like to be proud of our legacy, we have to wonder if our time will be known as a low point in the history of city building. American cities seem to be facing a clear choice between two visions. In one of these visions, the government concentrates on its basic responsibilities for planning, infrastructure, safety, and education. The city is a common ground, a place in which its citizens share their lives with one another. Its diversity, history, and beauty excite the spirit, stimulate the mind, and nourish growth. Beauty is everywhere – evidence of both civic pride and citizens’ self-respect – and the best of everything from earnings to education can be found in the city. The second vision is a much less pleasant possibility. Here, the future will be worse than today and much worse than the good old days. In this city, the infrastructure is crumbling, crime is uncontrollable, the education system has failed, poverty is a permanent condition, and visual beauty has yielded to urban ugliness. All this occurs while the city is spending more money than ever, sometimes all the way to bankruptcy. Those able to do so move away as the city touches them. The first of these visions is the city we would all like to call home. The second is the one I read about in the morning paper. It is the city that I – and all too many Americans – experience every day. Ours became a great nation almost overnight, by history’s clock. This amazing accomplishment came from ordinary people with extraordinary ideas, but little else to with which to work. Their ideas freed the human potential needed to create the greatest nation on earth. How ironic that in the second half of the 20th century our cities seemed to be governed by the belief that solutions to their problems can only be found at a higher level of government. Faced with challenges in transportation, education, infrastructure, crime, and homelessness – to mention just a few – our cities have impotently and addictively linked their futures to the county seat, the state capital, or the more distant national capital. Cities – the building blocks of our remarkable nation – are crumbling because their addiction has robbed them of spirit, quashed their individuality, and stolen their creativity. An addiction is a condition, not an excuse. Cities can say “no” to it any time they want, and the time is now. They can begin by saying “no” to the strings inevitably attached to funding by other government levels. If these governments will not return the taxpayer’s money string-free, let them keep it. (Wouldn’t that be a shocker!) Cities may have only their dignity and creativity, but at least they have what they need. It is time for cities to take charge of their own destinies, to govern themselves, and to carve their own places in history. Cities should be free to engage in friendly competition with one another as they apply different solutions to similar challenges. Success can be emulated and failure cast aside, to everyone’s benefit. Most importantly cities would be free to democratically establish their own values and their own lifestyles. Each city would be unique, the only place on earth quite like it. Citizens would have choices, developers would know the ground rules, and we could all join hands and start building great cities again. ‹‹ back |