City-focused reporting has suffered another setback this week as news that the Guardian Cities initiative at The Guardian will be shuttering has been made public.
In a farewell letter published in The Guardian, Guardian Cities editor Chris Michaels writes, "Since its founding six years ago, Guardian Cities has grown from a small experiment into a huge community," adding, "We have tried to shape how the world understands urbanisation: namely, as one of the truly transformative global phenomena of the 21st century." Regarding the end of the vertical's run as a leading source of global urbanism in-depth reporting, Michaels added, "Now, however, it’s time for a change. After many years of renewed generosity from the Rockefeller Foundation, whose arms-length support meant that we retained full editorial independence in every way, Cities is closing its doors."
No specific reason was given for the end of the initiative, though online commentators were quick to point out that the end of Guardian Cities follows the retooling of the 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) arm of the Rockefeller Foundation last year.
A 2019 report from CityLab, for example, highlights the recent change in leadership at the Rockefeller Foundation that led to the end of the 100 Resilient Cities effort, a transformative program launched in 2013 as a response to increasingly destructive natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. According to the CityLab report, Raj Shah, who took over from Judith Rodin as Rockefeller Foundation president in 2017, moved to prioritize "quantifying the impact of Rockefeller’s investments at the level of individual lives," a shift from the more cerebral issues of municipal financing and "resilience" initiative support that had emanated through the 100RC program previously.
A news release announcing the Guardian Cities launch in 2014 from the Rockefeller Foundation cites "highlighting resilience" as one of the goals of the initiative, a focus that included placing a "focus on the issue of urban resilience, the ability of a city to prepare for, withstand, and rebound more quickly and effectively from acute shocks and chronic stresses." The release adds, "This section will provide a space for relevant stories, lessons learned, and best practices related to urban resilience, a subject of special interest to The Rockefeller Foundation."
The end of Guardian Cities comes less than a month after Bloomberg Media purchased and retooled the CityLab brand itself by replacing a significant portion of the writing staff there. In recent months, Vox-owned Curbed has also shuttered a collection of its regionally specific outlets, including city sites specific to Washington, D.C., Seattle, and New Orleans.
This is such a shame. I really enjoyed (and more to the point, learned a lot) from their coverage. Their POPS coverage, concrete series, skyscraper series (Olly Wainwright's story on the super skinny towers of NYC last year was a standout), homelessness series...I can't think of too many other English-language outlets that approached these stories with such depth and nuance. (Maybe somebody has suggestions?)
It's alarming that the list of outlets doing in-depth urban analysis and coverage is dwindling - we know what we'll lose with the disappearance of Guardian Cities and will find out what's going to happen with Citylab...I know the economic proposition of investigative journalism on urbanism and architecture isn't a great one but we all lose out when we lose outlets like this.
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good
riddance?
Why?
This is such a shame. I really enjoyed (and more to the point, learned a lot) from their coverage. Their POPS coverage, concrete series, skyscraper series (Olly Wainwright's story on the super skinny towers of NYC last year was a standout), homelessness series...I can't think of too many other English-language outlets that approached these stories with such depth and nuance. (Maybe somebody has suggestions?)
It's alarming that the list of outlets doing in-depth urban analysis and coverage is dwindling - we know what we'll lose with the disappearance of Guardian Cities and will find out what's going to happen with Citylab...I know the economic proposition of investigative journalism on urbanism and architecture isn't a great one but we all lose out when we lose outlets like this.
Urbanism journalism was elitist market urbanism and counterproductive, with no design rigor at its core. How many times must we read the same thing over and over again -- NYC and SF are fantastic, every city should be like them, oh but they need to build more housing, also cars are evil, oh and why are there so many homeless people? Meanwhile look away at doing any substantial critique of cookie cutter developer garbage being squeezed down the tube. You mid-americans just don't get it!
Theres only so many times you can say the same thing over and over again. Mostly self-affirming lifestyle drivel for urban elitists.
Now we can get back to the nitty gritty of what makes cities -- architecture -- the particulars and not "smart mayors" or wifi-schemes and bike lanes.
Good riddance, indeed. The Guardian has been serving as a useful idiot for Russian media for many years. If The Guardian was so naïve as to republish Russian government narratives about the downing of the Malaysian Airlines flight a few years ago, what credibility should we accord them in any other matter? Timothy Snyder has reported that government controlled Russian media generated a different and unique theory each day of the week for a whole week after that jet was shot down. Their goal: total obfuscation. The Guardian lapped it all up and regurgitated Russian nonsense to their readers.
I also concur with Chemex. City Lab is an echo chamber with beliefs, grudges and agendas standing in for data, experience and insight (Richard Florida excluded). City Lab's most notable achievement has been to unintentionally expose the substantial gulf between journalists and urban designers on one side and the design professions on the other side. Design professionals know that shared urban spaces become richer through the actual work of building stuff, analyzing our work and resolving to make improvements the next time. Policy statements, mea culpas, restitutions and all forms of "nudging" have little or nothing to do with creating vibrant and engaging urban experiences.
By the way, I do not consider Thomas Heatherwick to be a design professional, in case anyone wants to bring up the shawarma.
It's quite obvious what happened. The Rockefeller Foundation stopped funding it, and it had to close. That's a major problem for foundation funded initiatives in general - once their support stops, the initiative, no matter how good, comes to an end. It's why when grants like this are written there needs to be the expectation and process put in place to achieve financial independence. Otherwise, a major community asset like this is lost at the whim of a foundation funding cycle.
As an aside, I would also argue that the leadership and staff at foundations in general are so displaced from the original funding source and principles from which they started that they fail to recognize that financial sustainability is actually a capitalist process and not a philanthropic one. It puts non-profits in a damn hard spot.
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