Winter 2012

New Life for Old Cities

by Patrick Piuma

SMALL, GRITTY, AND GREEN:
The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World.
By Catherine Tumber.
MIT Press. 211 pp. $24.95

Not long ago I caught sight of a bumper sticker that read “86-64” affixed to a bicycle parked outside Harvest, a popular new locavore restaurant in Louisville’s burgeoning arts district. One of Harvest’s founding partners is a Kentucky farmer and leader in the urban agriculture movement that is taking hold in this riverfront municipality of nearly 600,000 residents. The sticker referred to a controversial grassroots initiative to tear down an elevated section of Interstate 64 that separates the city from the Ohio River and replace it with a tree-lined boulevard and an expansion of Waterfront Park. It struck me that here was yet more proof that Louisville, an aging midsize industrial city, is undergoing a transformation.

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Patrick Piuma is the director of the Urban Design Studio at the University of Louisville.
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