The death and life of small North American cities (The Globe and Mail)
The Troy Waterfront Farmers Market features prominently in this Dec. 11, 2021 Op-ed in The Globe And Mail, Canada’s largest newspaper.
The death and life of small North American cities
REIF LARSEN
Reif Larsen is a writer and the founder of the Future of Small Cities Institute.
Entering the glass vestibule of a former jewellery store in downtown Troy, N.Y., I found myself surrounded by a cluster of translucent helium balloons, their strings replaced with dangling filmstrips from classic movies such as Psycho, each frame of Janet Leigh’s visage pigmented in bright chromatics à la Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe series. Halfway between sidewalk and storefront, it was as if I were momentarily suspended in the transparent time capsule of the celluloid itself.
I paused on this threshold, marveling at the archeology of our urban spaces. The large building that housed the storefront was once a bustling Masonic Temple, site of much ritual and scroll unfurling, before a 1970s “urban renewal” program awkwardly readapted its cavernous interior into the Rensselaer County Senior Center. In 2019, tech-entrepreneur Bob Bedard bought the deteriorating building with plans to transform it into a regional Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence.
These balloons now subsuming my entrance were a mini design intervention by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute architecture student Alexandrea Agyekum, whose design studio, led by artist Michael Oatman, was studying the empty storefront as the site of a pop-up exhibition space.
Their first show, mounted for a week in September, 2021, was an exhibition on the history of exhibitions — the space was filled with videos, posters, installations and cabinets of curiosity that the students had installed overnight. Ms. Agyekum was exploring the ephemeral, sensory journey of entering a ground-floor space — what draws us in off the sidewalk? What makes these houses of retail a cultural ritual, a spectacle, a collective experience?
My organization, The Future of Small Cities Institute, was working with Prof. Oatman’s class to transform the storefront into a kind of “urban room” that would host a series of exhibitions on sustainable city design solutions, beginning with a show on the past, present and future of Hudson River waterfronts in the spring of 2022.
Such is the way in these small, postindustrial cities like Troy, with a population of just over 50,000, where collaboration, experimentation and adaptation bloom, often out of necessity.
Hamstrung by tight budgets, stretched workers and innumerable capacity issues, these small legacy cities across North America are forced to lean into public, private and community partnerships to solve the myriad challenges posed by their aging urban landscapes. There is never enough time, money or resources in these cities, yet owing to the compact size of their urban footprints, small, nimble projects and initiatives can have big effects.
For years, these small legacy cities – gutted by a loss in manufacturing, pockmarked by abandoned industrial spaces, and hampered by a dwindling population – have struggled to make a sustained economic recovery. Yet the tides may finally be shifting. The rapid expansion of hybrid and remote workplaces during the pandemic, along with a climate crisis that has underscored the vulnerability of our bigger cities and laid bare the necessity for community resilience, has suddenly made places like Troy ripe for adaptation in the 21st century.
This, then, has become the central question for small cities: Can they harness their flexibility and transition from spaces of disinvestment to sustainable, inclusive communities? Balancing smart, innovative development with the continuing challenges of equity in a post-COVID (or COVID-endemic) world remains a tall task for any city – big or small. And perhaps there is no better place in which to witness this evolution than the complex stage of the small-city Main Street.
The Troy Waterfront Farmers Market, which closes several blocks of River Street each Saturday and attracts more than 14,000 people from around the region, was a huge factor in transforming Troy’s downtown from a no-fly zone just 10 years ago to the vibrant cornucopia of shops, eateries and services that it is now.
The model of the farmer’s market, a now-ubiquitous urban intervention with roots in the ancient bazaar – the original Main Street – is deceivingly revolutionary in how it asks us to reimagine entrenched, late-20th century ideas of streetscapes, food systems and retail architecture: Streets can be for people; food systems can be deeply local and circular; retail space can be lightweight and flexible.
“The market is a sensory experience,” said Stephen Ridler, who manages the farmer’s market. “With a market booth, the whole store is the storefront. There’s a transparency there, and at the same time you can be walking in the middle of the street, looking at all this historic architecture around you.”
This turns out to be one of the pillars to downtown revitalization: Give people a reason to get out of their cars and walk and linger and touch the surfaces of your town.
