"In the end, Kotkin offers no blueprints for re-establishing urban greatness on the American continent. Certainly emulating Singapore is not a strategy many cities would want to try. What he does do is catalog the mistakes he thinks quite a few of them are making as they try to create urban revival: He believes that gentrification, the attempt to repopulate a downtown with cadres of singles, childless couples and empty nesters, will never return a city to greatness. Meaningful renewal requires a large influx of families, he says, and gentrification isnt familistic... Thats his main argument against the New Urbanists, who might seem to be his natural allies in a drive for 21st-century urban revival."
Thanks to The Practice of New Urbanism Listserv
