Did you catch Goff Week back in the spring? Well, the response from readers was so strong that we started planning our next themed week immediately. Urbanism was an easy choice of topic: it cracks open an interesting and critical vector for storytelling about Tulsa, with its domineering postwar car culture, its commitment to sprawl, and its eternal struggle to achieve population density.
And sure enough, our writers delivered! We’ve got a rich slate of one-of-a-kind stories for you for The Pickup’s Urbanism Week.
First, Ellen Ray takes us deep into the national housing crisis—as well as a little personal lore—in order to understand why Tulsa just can’t build the housing it needs to achieve the level of density that sustains bigger cities.
Then Micah Cash looks to the early 2000s at an ambitious city plan gone awry, and what lessons our city’s elite may have drawn from it. Sarah Power wonders whatever happened to that valuable third space, the neighborhood pool. And Wolf Hertzberg makes the case for improving our city’s options for bike transit, currently quite lacking.
We’ll also bring back a few classics on the topic of urbanism that we’ve already published, both from The Pickup and from the This Land archives, including Russell Cobb’s authoritative 2016 look at the making of the Gathering Place. Fortunately or unfortunately, these classic stories are as relevant as ever.
Thanks to Method Group for their generous sponsorship of Urbanism Week, and thanks also to Ryan McGahan at Well-Told for designing the killer Urbanism Week stamp you’ll see all over our stories.
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