The DMN has launched a new comprehensive report on the state of the city, billed as an update of its 2004 Tipping Points special section. Making reference to J. Erik Jonsson’s Goals for Dallas program, which was launched 50 years ago this year, Mark Lamster offers some context for the new project in an introductory essay:
Mayor Mike Rawlings leads a city at a time of immense private prosperity offset by sweeping poverty, a city of newly erected architectural marvels set amid a crumbling public infrastructure too extensive for it to cost-effectively maintain. No city has a greater untapped natural resource than the Trinity River corridor, yet we threaten to pave much of it over in the name of convenience. Downtown languishes and rebounds, seemingly at once. Our patterns of consumption – of land, of water, of energy – are pushing beyond our capacities to sustain them. As a public, we are physically and figuratively divided.
Confronted by these challenges, we might well ponder the same questions Jonsson posed to Dallasites decades ago. What are our goals, and how do we achieve them? What exactly do we want Dallas to be?
I have only started to dig into the report. Consider it a little weekend reading and a primer ahead of next week’s New Cities Summit, when Dallas hosts a global discussion about the future of cities.
