Summer 2004

Her kind of town

by Eugenia Smith

When she arrived in the Twin Cities for graduate school, Chicago native Judith Martin wondered where the tall buildings were. The IDS Tower was still in blueprint. Only the 32-story Foshay Tower broke through the otherwise modest, slightly rumpled skyline.

"I thought I had exiled myself to the smallest place in the world," recalls transplanted Chicagoan Martin, now professor of geography and director of the U's urban studies program.

Today, Martin allows, the grown-up city is "taller and wider," and so is her perspective. One of the country's foremost urbanists, Martin has spent the last 30 years taking the full measure of the many dimensions that make up a great city—most of them far less quantifiable than head counts, square footage, and building heights.

Walking the scholarly talk

Since completing her interdisciplinary doctoral program in American (urban) studies, Martin has viewed her research as a kind of active citizenship. When this citizen scholar isn't greeting students and others in her office overlooking the river she loves, she's out and about, walking the cities' sidewalks, trails, and policymaking corridors and talking to leaders and ordinary citizens alike.

On her scholarly peregrinations, Martin has explored probably every cranny of the Twin Cities metro area and trained her sharp and panoramic eye on many other cities as well. Like any good researcher, she misses nothing—taking in not only the history, politics, architecture, and landscapes of cities, but also their colors and cadences, the textures and rhythms of people's voices and lives. Translating what she has learned into award-winning teaching, she's also become a go-to person regionally and nationally on issues of urban planning and policy development.

Martin says she's still a big-city kid, shaped indelibly by her experiences growing up in Chicago. She is also a convert to the considerable charms of Minneapolis, which she nonetheless thinks of still as a "big small town" rather than a bona fide big city. The distinction, she says, is "fundamental in how people think about the place, how comfortable or uncomfortable we are with change."

Even the most nimble Twin Cities minds and imaginations have been challenged by the massive demographic and cultural changes unfolding in their midst over the past decade, says Martin. As their towns come more and more to mirror Chicago and other big cities, some long-time city dwellers have welcomed changes; others have been more grudging; still others have moved away. And new residents are moving in.

Taking the broad view

Martin's wide-angle view of cities embraces a broad geographic and cultural space. It takes in not only the city proper but also suburban and far-flung exurban communities—the entire region that has branched out from and surrounds, sustains, and is sustained by the urban taproot.

"Whether the issue is housing or crime or transportation or metropolitan governance, it's going to very quickly link out to a much broader spatial location," Martin says. "And that's true for all cities."

U.S. cities are not declining, Martin insists. In fact, cities nationwide are booming. Municipal governing bodies are reinvesting in cities; so are private developers and new immigrants. People are moving to urban centers from the suburbs. Urban commercial and entertainment districts are flourishing.

Managing public perceptions

Contributing to "flight" from the cities to the not-so-wide-open spaces of the suburbs, Martin observes, is the notion that urban centers are where "the problems" lie: If we leave, we're safe; those "city issues" are someone else's problem. "Except the reality is, the problems do not stay in one place," Martin says. "I'm an advocate for truth. The media should stop pitching the bizarre notion that the city is dangerous. Whether it's people buying and selling drugs, or slumlords deciding not to invest in improvements of urban properties, people are mobile. So trouble is mobile, too. As long as people can move easily from one place to another, the ‘problem' areas of the cities are everyone's problem."

In the worst-case scenario, misperceptions can contribute directly to the plunder and decline of neighborhoods. When, for example (in the 1960s), Interstate 94 sliced through Rondo, a predominantly African American St. Paul neighborhood, the demolitions and dislocations devastated the community.

"The view from the outside, shaped in part by the people who create and manage perceptions, was ‘It's a marginal neighborhood, a bad neighborhood,'" Martin says. "Of course, that wasn't the view of the people who lived there."

Stabilizing the tax base

Martin notes that the reshaping of cities by freeway construction and redevelopment almost invariably has been aimed at one overarching goal: "It's first and foremost about stabilizing and growing the property tax base. In the 1950s and '60s, if drawing red lines on the map and getting rid of the ‘problem' people in an area was good for the property tax base—go for it."

Stabilizing the tax base is a worthy goal, says Martin—that's how we pay for public services and amenities like schools and crime prevention and park maintenance. And yet, she cautions, "There may be unintended consequences for people and neighborhoods."

Noting that urban renewal's failures are now well documented, Martin says, "The whole thrust of urban renewal was about clearing out and starting new." Champions of urban renewal "weren't bad people with nefarious purposes. They were policy people grounded in 1930s, '40s, and '50s thinking that human behavior could be shaped by alterations in the physical landscape.

"They deeply believed that giving people new housing would improve their lives and improve their behavior and make them more likely to work. By the time the research evolved and took thinking in a whole new direction, the ‘projects' were in serious trouble."

The growth of a vision

Revitalization always "begins with public perception of a problem, advocacy for change, and then policy people saying at some point, 'We have to do something about this,'" says Martin. "It takes time for the funding to catch up to the research."

To illustrate, Martin points to the reclamation of Minneapolis's post-industrial Mississippi Riverfront, which today is crackling with life but for decades lay fallow, littered with the refuse of lost Minneapolis history—old railroad tracks, crumbling warehouses and mills, assorted rubble, refuse, and rodents.

"In 1972, the city laid out a vision for the next 25 years," says Martin, noting that Minneapolis's first riverfront revitalization plan, drawn up in 1917, was never implemented. "The 1972 plan had the support of elected officials who believed that if you could clean up the area, find new uses for historic buildings, and get new businesses to come in, we could grow the tax base, build a healthier city.

"It took political will, imagination, and faith in the vision. And it took hundreds of millions of dollars of public money before anybody spent dime one of private money."

The rebirth of the riverfront spells a watershed in perceptions of the area. "People used to say, incredulous, 'River? Why in the world would you want to live on the river?'" says Martin. "Now they're thinking, 'Why wouldn't you?' An urban condo near the river and near downtown is this generation's home on the lake."

Seeing is believing

Martin literally walks the public engagement talk that she has always championed. As a leader on urban issues she not only sits on boards, advises policymakers, and testifies before planning commissions, but also takes people on tours through the Twin Cities. The tours give both out-of-towners and longtime residents an opportunity to see city landmarks and landscapes in a whole new way.

"There are always people who say at the end of the tour, 'I've lived here my entire life and I've never seen that,'" she says. "Or 'I've never thought about that.'

"I help people see. I view that as a very important part of my educational mission as a professor at a land grant university. I think it's important thing to help people to understand the environment they live in."

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University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus
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