I enjoyed the last couple of rainy days watching my fall garden soak up some much-needed moisture, from my picture window where I read.
I was reading the book “Urbino” by the late Italian architect and planner Giancarlo de Carlo.
At a point in the mid-1800s, he identifies a new and groundbreaking trend, “the meeting.” Cities were being torn apart and redesigned to focus the populations and their creative potentials to meet at planned downtown centers.
In Urbino, Italy. this resulted in a jolt of social expression in the downtown that quickly faded like echoes in an empty arena. The low-income neighborhoods that were the historic support of the city crumbled as the energy of their inhabitants was pulled out of them. The only lasting development was the “high-class residences” where the flow of money is always centered.
This made me think about Evansville’s Downtown projects to bring new residents and new businesses. New development lines the same old pockets of the rich and the politicians. Existing neighborhoods and the residents that comprise them are exploited as cheap and disposable. Money changes hands and people are kept in their place.
Evansville’s struggling residents would do well to build up what is at our own front steps. The best hope for even the most wishful and far off future is to focus on the times we live in and work against the decay of the places closest to us.
anticedent 