Well the Congress for the New
Urbanism rolled into town nearly a month ago and I’ve finally gotten around to
doing a quick post about it. There have been flurries of different reviews both
good
and bad,
but even some of the bad points have merit. Buffalo put its best foot forward
mostly showing off the west side and downtown while experts weighed in on the
good, bad, and the ugly. Downtown had its fair (and deserved) share of
criticism. While it has been improving in recent years it has a long way to go
and most signs point to it getting done properly.
My biggest criticism was that
the east side and other neighborhoods that could have benefited from the
visiting experts were left out of the mix. While I understand that the way
these go is for people to get as much of the “good stuff” as they can, there
were plenty of neighborhoods in Buffalo that could have been great testing
grounds for new ideas. It would have been great to see Jeff Speck and Andres
Duany in Broadway-Fillmore talking about where and how to begin breathing new
life into the distressed neighborhood. It was a huge missed opportunity to
start a broader dialogue in neighborhoods that have practically been forgotten
by our city leaders.
Due to my hectic work
schedule I was only able to attend one of the official CNU events, Towards a
Walkable Buffalo by Jeff Speck. You can check out his
presentation in full here. Speck’s talk was loaded with interesting facts
and statistics, but he didn’t hold back about downtown’s failures. It’s definitely
worth the watch. You can check out eight other presentations by visiting the
CNU’s Youtube
channel here.
Thankfully, I was able to
attend many of the CNU NextGen events, which were probably better than many of
the official presentations. It was a great opportunity to talk to many of the
presenters one-on-one and show the good and bad of Buffalo. The bar crawl with
pedestrian superhero Peatonito, the gathering at the grain elevators, and
the tactical urbanism event at the Hotel Lafayette stood out as my favorites.
I even gave a tour of Hamlin
Park for about 50 people, half of whom were visitors to Buffalo having never
set foot on the east side. Robert T. Coles stole the show when we visited his
home on Humboldt Parkway. He discussed his attempts to stop the destruction of Humboldt
Parkway and how his experiences trying to stop some of the worst urban renewal
mistakes Buffalo made.
At the end of the week I was
lucky to celebrate with the key players in the NextGen events after a job very
well done by them all. For additional photos of my CNU coverage check out my Ipernity
album here.
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Thank you, Mike, again, for your incredible contribution to the event. The Hamlin tour park was excellent and worth the price of admission alone.
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