Alan Ehrenhalt, writing in The New Republic, discusses the many changes that have occurred in U.S. cities over the past decades, something "routinely described as gentrification." As he notes, though, the seismic shifts are "more complicated and more profound than the process [gentrification] suggests." Money quote: "We live in a big-box, big-chain century. But I think the youthful urban elites of the twenty-first-century are looking in some sense for the things [Jane] Jacobs valued, whether they have heard of her or not. They are drawn to the densely packed urban life that they saw on television and found vastly more interesting than the cul-de-sac world they grew up in. And, by and large, I believe central cities will give it to them." [The New Republic; via Boing Boing] —EV Grieve
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