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If the point is that naming alone is not that important when compared to good policy, design and implementation, I would agree. But to say, "naming of a neigborhood is utterly irrelevant" is not reality, naming is tightly connected to boundaries and is connected to politics and service delivery and opportunity, just ask any real estate agent.

The Williams Admin and CM Graham adopted a policy of shearing off the portion of Columbia Heights below Euclid and making apart of "U Street" or now "Logon/Dupont". The result is almost no investment connect CH below Euclid to Mid and Northern parts of the neighborhood. The result has been a waste of millions in DDOT and WMATA resources.

The DCUSA Garage unnecessarily may suck up $2M in NIF funds primarily because there has been political will and management time spent to make the resource work. Why,because inorder to make this resource work the focus would have to be on planning around serving Columbia Heights as a connected neighborhood. The unwritten and even written rule is that any work in this are must be Mt. Pleasant-centric. Even now one block in Mt. Pleasant is drawing more priority, time and energy from the Columbia Heights Streetscape project than 7 blocks in Columbia Heights combined. Names matter because names are important to politicians and most of the issues discussed here are more political than technical.

Even the new Circulator Bus route is designed more to achieve political purposes than transportation and good urban design purposes. This suboptimal route is moving forward instead of a well designed one, because Columbia Heights is not seen and treated as a unified neighborhood. This obession with the renaming of Columbia Heights is at least partily responsible for suboptimal urban and transportation policy, implementation and wasted tax dollars.

So many New Urbanist are pacified with the more "twittery" aspects policy, while remaining silent while transportation policy in a key neighborhood is being rendered unsustainable. Failing to realize that this name debate is really one of the most important urban policy debates of our time.

by W Jordan on Apr 19, 2009 10:33 am • link • report