I just completed living in Charlotte for the past year after having lived in larger cities like DC, NY and LA. I left after only a year and hated every minute in Charlotte. It never felt like a city, but rather like an overgrown suburb with a bland densifying center. I don't mean to bash Charlotte, it is pleasant enough, and it's trying to correct some of its past mistakes, but I'm not sure it is the right model for mid-western cities to emulate.

Charlotte is little more than a densely built office park, with a few scattered older buildings rescued from obscurity, surrounded by acres of parking and a few sports facilities thrown in. A few new condos and mixed use projects promise to keep afloat the bars and restaurants built for the banker crowd that populate the office towers that make up the 4 or 5 central downtown blocks. Throw in a few cultural institutions (but no real urban parks to speak of). This is surrounded by an inner freeway loop. The only remaining urban development is some victorian houses in the Fourth Ward and 2 1920 neighborhoods: South End/Dilworth and Midwood Plaza. One can find greater urban diversity and density in the suburbs of Boston or Philly or Chicago or NY than exists in the city of Charlotte.

Charlotte's tiny lightrail line that won't reach the airport for another 15 or 20 years is a welcome though feeble effort. They have been improving the city center compared to what it was BUT PLEASE do not hold this city up as a model for midwestern cities. Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinatti all exceed Charlotte (I've never been to Indianapolis). In addition, except for the south side of Charlotte, if you go North or West or East you find vast areas of underutilized indutrial sprawl and dreary neighborhoods, extreme segregation crime and uninspired sprawl. Charlotte is making all the mistakes of Atlanta without any of the charm or history. (Note Charlotte is now the size that Atlanta was in the early 1970's and at that time Atlanta was completeing MARTA). Please look elsewhere for inspiration for your cities.

Charlotte is so far from being a Chicago or NY or London. It is delusional for anyone to think that it is even achievable for Charlotte to join them. Ask any Charlottean and they will smuggly say that they don't want to be a NY or Atlanta because they have everything they need. Yet everyone I knew wanted to go to DC or Atlanta or NY whenever they needed a city fix, and when I said I had lived in NY or might move to Miami I was routinely asked why would I want to be in Charlotte. Every artist I met regretted being in Charlotte because there was no support for new work and the director of the McColl Gallery (an exceptional amazing institution) noted that their artwork was bought by outsiders from the coasts, not from Charlotte. Admittedly, I have a single person urbanite perspective. If I had a family then I might feel differently. Charlotte is highly segregated and like DC, all the action is in one quadrant (in Charlotte's case it is the southern pie piece between I-77 and Monroe Blvd). Charlotte may be the big city for the Carolinas but it has a long way to go to become a true world class (or even national) city.

Regarding the Midwest: remember Indy hosted the Pan-Am games (and built the facilities to support them during the 80's); during the skyscraper boom of the 90's, Indianapolis managed to raise what was then the tallest building between Chicago and Atlanta. In this decade the focus has been upon becoming a serious destination for meetings and conventions through massive expansion of our tourist/visitor infrastructure. Not exactly a failure of ambition or an embodiment of the "take what we can get" mindset.

Overall, no great city manages to avoid the prestige problem. Every group in power wants more power, and once a region attains global city status, the best way for the local leaders to increase their own power is to build monuments to themselves. Those leaders know that they won't be remembered for their achievements on health care or poverty reduction, but for what they built. This is especially bad in cities perceived as rich, like New York, the Bay Area, and Paris, where the upper class can stay cocooned in its neighborhoods and never step into the poorer areas further out.

Cities need to be more efficient and more livable if they are going to come back.

I mention the Northeast because its ties to the Midwest are stronger than other regions, and it too seems to suffer from much of the same malaise–aging infrastructure, obsolete housing stock, ossified political boundaries. Yet its exceptions to the norm–specifically Boston, New York and DC–somehow seem to drown out media attention on all the regional failures. No doubt it helps that so much more media is based in Washington and New York, and they hate to dwell on the misery in their own back yards. Connecticut and New Jersey, two of the wealthiest states, do not have a single truly vibrant freestanding city among them. Ohio, though far less wealthy in aggregate, has a stronger economy in Columbus than either of these do. And what about upstate New York? Maybe my own senses are deceiving me, and maybe GDP growth of Northeast cities belies their persistently sluggish population figures. But I remain convinced that one can dissect the problems of the Midwest and draw many valid conclusions. A failure of ambition may be one of them, but I do not think this sentiment is unique to the Midwest, nor particularly pronounced there.

However I take issue with mid-sized cities making comparisons between themselves and global cities such as NY, London, and Tokyo. The metro population scales are often off by a magnitude of ten. Cities with metro populations around 1.5 to 2 million should be looking nationally and globally at cities with 2 to 3 (mabye 4) million for inspiration. (I am recalling the Milwaukee Transit powerpoint from last post with pictures of Paris and Beijing alongside those of Milwaukee.) Otherwise those cities look foolishly ambitious. I rather would see midwest cities look to Montreal and Vancouver (great cities) for ideas.

What is the city you have in mind as a place that decided to forsake prestige projects in favor of the types of investments you suggest?