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Diversity in buildings

The latest edition of Harper’s Magazine has an article with good messages for the city of Spokane. It is titled “Death of a Great American City, New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence”. It seems that most of the major cities have one overwhelming problem. They built walls of skyscrapers, making the city boring, ghettos for the rich and the homeless. What we need is diversity! Diversity of people, jobs, income, buildings, stores.” Exuberant diversity,” Jane Jacobs called it. To achieve this very ambitious goal, we will need everybody’s wisdom, will and patience.

Let’s start with the buildings along the south side of Riverfront Park. We don’t need “skyscrapers” there and we don’t want them. For the rest, if we could space the “skyscrapers” widely apart, they might be acceptable, but almost impossible. We might have to settle for a building height of, say, fifteen stories, which would give us a human scale. We have two good examples downtown: the M-Building for high income, the Ridpath for middle and low income.

Lewis Mumford said: “The city, next to language, is man’s greatest work of art.” Let’s look at it that way, and make Spokane the jewel it can be.

Moritz Kundig

Spokane



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