Fifth birthday retrospective: the best of the best
Houston Strategies is five years old this week, which is reasonably old by blog standards. You can find the inaugural post here, and my very first "strategy" post here: a proposed elite UH - Institute of Technology campus. And now here we are 802 posts later (!) - so much content I can't even remember most of it, and count on Google to help me find it. So I've decided to pull out the best of the best for this birthday post. Most of you know I do regular quarterly and annual highlights posts, and I decided to cull those down to the very most important posts of the last five years - roughly the top 3% - the ones that I think really form the foundation of the blog's reputation. I tried to cut the list down as much as possible, but if you still find it a bit overwhelming, you might try reading one-a-day over a month or so. Enjoy.UPDATE 2012
- A vision for Metro's new CEO (Chronicle op-ed)
- A new brand for Houston: Houspitality
- Does Houston have the highest standard of living in the world?
- Houston's Walled Garden
- 7th anniversary post: The Ultimate Houston Strategy
- My TEDx Houston talk, mostly about Houston (a summary of some of my better ideas from this blog)
- A targeted tourism strategy for Houston
- The real answer to Houston's traffic congestion
2009
- Securing Houston's economic and world-city future, including increasing local venture capital
- An agenda for Mayor Parker (links to many key posts)
- Why the feds should stay out of high-speed rail (and most transportation)
- Texas and America's four great growth waves
- A Pragmatic Approach to Houston’s Future (part 1, part 2)
2007
- The many meanings Houston as an "Open City of Opportunity"
- Opportunity Urbanism, 4 drivers op-ed, and response to critics
- Architects vs. Economists (the planning vs. free market spectrum)
- Planning: Panacea, Poison Pill, or just Purgatory?
- Houston's identity: Global Village, American Dream, Texas Spirit (lead-up posts: strategy and previous branding attempts, why brand a city?)
- Transportation Lessons from Houston: Part 1, Part 2
- Applying Jane Jacobs' 4 tenets of vibrant neighborhoods to car-based cities (mobility/draw-zones for vibrancy)
- Density, Vibrancy, and Opportunity Zones
- Unity vs. fragmentation in metro areas and a related post, The importance of keeping jobs in the core
- A hypothesis on the deeper psychology of rail
- Commuter rail is the wrong ride (Chronicle op-ed)
- Why does Houston have such a great restaurant scene?
- Keys to unlock our gridlock (includes a link to the op-ed and the 3-part series)
- Realistically repurposing the Astrodome
- Relieving the north-south traffic bottleneck
-Tory
Labels: highlights
posted by Tory Gattis @ 7:09 PM
7 Comments:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY HOUSTON STRATEGIES!
Thanks!
Many happy returns. Sixteen more years and the blog can legally drink in the US!
Reading your post about applying Jacobs' principles to car-oriented cities got me thinking, what about cities where people own cars and drive to work but walk to neighborhood retail?
I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts about malls - specifically, how enclosed malls work in a city. I know they do in every city I lived in before New York; their absence in the Northeast took some adjusting to.
Your first question reminds me of another post of mine, but I can't find it! It talked about how the scale of walking and cars are so hugely different (blocks vs. miles) that it is perfectly reasonable to have a city of New Urbanist neighborhoods tied together with a strong arterial and freeway network. At the neighborhood walking level, Jane's original rules matter, but at the larger city and metro levels - when people get in their car to go beyond their immediate neighborhood - then the other rules kick in.
Your comment about malls reminded me of yet another old post, but this time I'm lucky enough to find the link: http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-there-arent-more-new-urbanist.html
That post also ties back to your first question about walking to neighborhood retail in mixed-use areas.
Enjoyed your 2009 post about Houston as the 4th wave city.
Shocked you missed Texas A&M as the equivalent to Georgia Tech? B-CS is about an hour from The Woodlands/some of the distant suburbs on 290.
Just as Ivy League-ers moved to Boston and NYC, A&M grads are extremely influential in the oil and gas business, not only in Texas but worldwide.
TAMU is a great asset to the greater Houston region, but just a bit too far out to really create a lot of local tech startup synergies. But I completely agree they feed a lot of well educated talent into the city.
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