Committee on the Environment

How does the Republican Mid-term Victory Square with the Age of Cities?

  • 1.  How does the Republican Mid-term Victory Square with the Age of Cities?

    Posted 11-07-2014 10:01 AM
    This message has been cross posted to the following Discussion Forums: Committee on the Environment and Regional and Urban Design Committee .
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    Friday, November 7, 2014

    How does the Republican Mid-term Victory Square with the Age of Cities?


    Larry Hogan, the newly elected Republican governor of the progressive blue state of Maryland, explained the shock and awe that his election has brought to the defeated democratic electorate and parts of the media that he says dwell inside an echo chamber:  "The pollsters and the pundits and the talking heads and the media all seem to talk to each other, and it creates sort of an echo chamber," Hogan said. "I was talking to Marylanders. What we were hearing, from everywhere, was an overwhelming sense of frustration."

    Urbanists and planners reading CityLab, Urban Land, and Brookings research may have wound up in just such an echo chamber, with references to millennials, urbanism, and the sharing economy ricocheting around and around. In this world view cool millennials sit in sidewalk cafes sipping lattes and designing a new society where Uber and transit replace the personal automobile, where innovation districts are springing up in aging warehouse districts, and issues of gender and race are a thing of the past. 
    The mid-term elections sent a sonic boom through this echo chamber, leaving progressives scrambling for cover and searching for meaning. 69 of 99 state legislative bodies in Republican hand, 31 Republican governors to only 18 Democratic ones.
    Map of US House of Representative races 2014
    After decades of anti-urbanity, urban flight, sprawl, and .....

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    Nikolaus Philipsen FAIA
    Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
    Baltimore MD
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