My Goals for this Blog

With this blog, Renewed City (STL), I aim to highlight what is going wrong, and going right, in the interconnected issues of suburban sprawl and urban decay. While I'll focus on St. Louis, since it's where I'll live, I'll try to bring in other cities as well. I have no formal training in architecture or urban planning; my educational background is in history, with some law. When it comes to good, and especially bad, archictecture, however, to use a famous phrase, "I know it when I see it."
When I post pictures of abandoned old buildings and ugly sprawl, as I often will, it's not to put down St. Louis (or whichever city I'm posting from). It's to prod, to make the reader think "We can do better than this." Maybe if we spent more time looking at ugly buildings instead of driving past them we'd be more inclined to do something about them.
My background is rural, so many issues that are both urban and suburban still seem unusual to me. I'll be learning as I go. Half of my family, however, is from Detroit, so urban decay is quite familiar to me. It is my hope that St. Louis (and, indeed, Detroit) can be renewed - not in the sense of top-down federal urban renewal that has proven to be an almost complete disaster, but in the grassroots sense of regrowth from the bottom up.
It may seem unusual for someone who grew up in a rural area to be so concerned with the health of cities, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Urban and rural America share a common enemy in suburban sprawl. As far as suburbia goes, I'm not against it in principle. People have to live somewhere, and with a growing population, that means expanding outwards. The last time I checked, however, St. Louis City wasn't exactly running out of places for live. Also, if we're going to built new suburbs, we should be building them in ways that are not 100% car dependent. I'm also not against building new buildings. If I seem to show a bias towards older buildings, it's because so much of what we've built in the last fifty years has looked so awful. I'd love to see new construction that took into account an appreciation for aesthetics and placement - that is, something more than a concrete box in a parking lot.