As long as there are other places to go– places with higher wages, better education, cultural opportunities, a more congenial political environment, a less stultifying built environment– the Tampa Bay area’s creativity drain will probably continue. Accelerating the process may be: The inevitable long-term rise in the cost of commuting. It is unlikely that oil prices [...]
“Do what they did, you’ll get what they got.” I am not sure that Tampa Bay needs to reinvent the wheel on its way to urban viability, but… Many of the cities that have truly come back from the edge and become centers of creative post-industrial life are very different from the Tampa/St Pete metro area. They [...]
Let’s quit pretending. Tampa isn’t a city. St Petersburg isn’t a city. Clearwater and all the other municipalities in the Tampa bay region are not cities in the traditional sense. Lacking a coherent functioning core and distinct boundaries (other than saltwater), they are, or have become, no more than jurisdictional regions. The small urban cores of [...]
Tampa Bay isn’t that different from any other post-WW II collection of sunbelt suburbs in search of a city. LA, Phoenix, Albuquerque, El Paso, Houston, Orlando, Jacksonville – the built landscape is pretty much the same. Designed to isolate us in autos and ranchettes, these sprawls give us lawns and shopping malls and de facto [...]
