Sneak Peek: Wed March 13, 2024

Happy Wednesday! Today's upload to YouTube is about a particular type of city infrastructure that often takes up prime space in your downtown, but that you yourself probably rarely use. Convention Centers! (New York's Javits Center pictured above.)

Now, depending what you do for a living, you might go to convention centers in OTHER cities. In fact, you might do it fairly often! So this video kind of takes the perspective of: for an urbanist, what makes for a "good" convention center to go and visit, and the narrative is designed around that. And of course that intersects with things like how well it dovetails with he urban context, how walkable/bikeable the immediate area is (often a proxy for the downtown as a whole), is there high quality transit...the usual stuff. I had a ton of fun making this one, and, shockingly, it is NOT a top ten list!

The other idea I've had on my list for quite awhile is to do more of an on-site case study of a convention center for my "Investigating Heinous Land Uses" series, which has kind of been on hold since I moved to Albuquerque, because there just aren't super-illustrative examples of those kinds of things here the way there were in Vegas (power centers, lifestyle centers, drive-thru culture, etc.). I'll probably come back to it, because one thing that gnawed at me as I put today's video together was that, even for the "good" convention centers...I kind of wish they weren't there and there was more housing/services/retail instead.

So today, tell me about your thoughts and experiences with the convention center in your own city -- are there events you go there for? Does it get used for emergency things like vaccination centers, shelter, etc? Strong thoughts on OTHER cities' convention centers, or the institution and the philosophy behind them in general? I do touch on all of this stuff a bit in the video, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.