Urban renewal can bring welcome change to failing neighborhoods, but planners must continue to evaluate those well-intentioned efforts and ask "what's next" to blunt some of the unintended consequences.
"Any urban planning effort comes with a set of values that go into the design, said Luis Bettencourt, a complex-systems researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. In San Francisco, he said, those values include fostering a culture of creativity, which has been a double-edged sword. Encouraging edgy neighborhoods full of coffee shops and artists ends up attracting new residents and businesses, increasing rents and ultimately homogenizing the neighborhood. Gentrification, in other words."
The article is written by science journalist Nathan Collins, a former SFI Omidyar Fellow.
Read the article in San Francisco Public Press (June 12, 2014)