Columns

Practical Developers, Idealistic Planners, and Their Disagreements (Some of the Time)

By Russell Arben Fox | July 15, 2023

The tension between acting in accordance with one’s ethical or moral principles versus contenting oneself with pragmatic efficiency and “realism” is one of the oldest tensions in the whole history of philosophy. It’s an old and abiding tension in part because one can experience it everywhere. Here in Wichita, KS, I’ve lately been thinking about primarily in connection with an intersection a little over a mile from my house, where the major arterial streets Central and Ridge meet. (Allow me a digression here; I’ll get back to my main point presently.)

Central and Ridge, in west Wichita, on the southwest corner, looking northeast

North of Central and Ridge, on the west side of Ridge, looking south

It is not, by any possible stretch of the imagination, a pleasantly walkable intersection, nor a location of any kind of real artistic activity or civic engagement. It’s a stretch of two stroads, to use a Strong Towns term.

Columns

On Forums, Factions, Strikes, and Elections

By Russell Arben Fox | June 29, 2023

Monday night there was forum involving five of the candidates to be Wichita’s next mayor—though only three serious ones: former Wichita Councilmember Jared Cerullo, activist Celeste Racette, and the incumbent, Mayor Brandon Whipple. The forum was held at the SEIU Hall and organized by the Sedgwick County Grassroots Democrats, so it’s easy to imagine that as the reason why the other two serious candidates—Councilmember Bryan Frye, a longtime and well-connected Republican, and Lily Wu, a former television journalist and registered Libertarian—decided not to attend (though that didn’t stop Cerullo, also a Republican, from showing up). But considering how much controversy over partisanship there has already been on the Democratic side of the mayoral race so far (something that I think is partly being forced by the specific positioning of a couple of these candidates) perhaps it’s just as well that the debate on Democratic turf featured primarily those most tied up with that side of the aisle. I say “Democratic turf,” though of course a union hall isn’t necessarily Democratic party territory. But then again, who am I kidding?

Columns

Local Politics and the Development “Problem”

By Russell Arben Fox | June 27, 2023

I’ve become a major fan of the Kansas City-area architect and designer Kevin Klinkenberg’s “The Messy City” podcast. I don’t know Kevin—I met him once, briefly, at a Strong Towns gathering in Tulsa years ago, and I made use of the material he presented at that gathering a couple of times, but most of what I know about his work and ideas I’ve learned from listening to him over the past several months. His approach to thinking about land use, city design, and our built environment—all central concerns to anyone who lives in any kind of urban polity, and I would say especially a mid-sized one like Wichita—is not my own, and I appreciate the challenge that presents. His perspective on the sustainability or affordability of the places in which we live and move and play and work is profoundly practical; his defense of the local and the incremental is rigorously apolitical and empirical, with next to no engagement with the policies and theories (both political and sociological) which I would argue undergird the ways in which we even conceive and talk about the local and the incremental. Which is fine—I don’t think it’s imperative that everyone who cares about our places have critical takes on the urban growth machine or municipal democracy!