On Tuesday, over a million Americans made it to Washington, D.C. to attend President Obama's inauguration. Christopher Hawthorne relates the nation's refreshed optimism to an impending revival of urbanism and public space.
"Obama has used the anonymity and energy of cities -- where he has spent all of his adult life, first in college in Los Angeles and New York and then in Chicago's Hyde Park -- to forge his public persona and ready himself for the exposure of a political career. And he ran for president without apology as an urban candidate. In one video clip widely shared online, he can be seen telling a crowd that when he was young he wanted to be an architect. In another, he explains during a summer campaign stop that he is a fan of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," Jane Jacobs' landmark 1961 study of fine-grained, up-close urbanism.
Just as in the inherently optimistic twist of that book's title -- not life before death but the reverse -- a sense of urbanism and public space reborn, or even brought back from the dead, seems guaranteed to glimmer through Obama's first 100 days. How long it can manage to hold a place in what promises to be an uncomfortably crowded policy spotlight, though, is very much an open question."
FULL STORY: Public space takes center stage at Obama inauguration

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