Spanking new airports abound. Boston, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and New York have taken down their versions of the Gardiner Expressway. Nearly every large city is involved in a major transit initiative. All are building housing downtown and investing heavily in the arts and culture. This city-building energy is infused with an understanding that good architecture and urban design are the connective tissue of the information economy.
Appearance is everything.
As part of its urban planning work in many of these cities, our company looked at 14 major U.S. cities to catalogue where, what and how they had invested in the 1990s. So, Toronto is investing at about one-fifth the rate of its civic competitors. The primary source of public funds for the regeneration of U.S. cities is the federal government, although a multitude of urban programs exist at the state and local levels as well. The single largest infrastructure investment program in the United States is the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century. The way U.S. cities have organized themselves for this reinvestment program is also distinctive.