What midwestern city seems most “urban” to you (except Chicago)?
 

In the Midwest, unlike on the east coast, you seem to have a huge drop off in urbanity from its premiere city (Chicago) to the cities that come after.

When you go to the east coast’s “second cities” they are still quite walkable and urban.

In the Midwest, though, it’s not quite so obvious.

This thread is not to discuss “second cities” in regards to importance or economic might. It’s about urbanity in regards to:

1. A large footprint of contiguous walkability, or at least areas that are well connected to eachother
2. Transit quality. That doesn’t have to mean trains. High frequency bus service deserves some merit
3. Density of population, employment, education, entertainment
4. Policies that favor urbanity versus continued erosion of core cities.
5. Shear size of extant prewar (or postwar but urban-designed) built environment.

Any thoughts? On the surface Minneapolis appears to be the lead contender, but I don’t know nearly enough about it (or this topic) to say that with any authority.

I wonder how long it’ll take for this thread to devolve into bashing Detroit, St. Louis, or Cleveland.

To answer your question, I’ll go with Minneapolis. Madison, WI as well.

St. Louis has the best traditional urbanity, albeit chopped up by abandonment and urban prairie.

Minneapolis seems to be the most healthy, consistent, and successfully urban city in the modern sense.

Minneapolis probably has the best walkable environment overall given the large amount of recent infill, but the historic built vernacular of the city outside of its apartment districts (wood-framed detached houses) isn't very urban feeling, which leads to the same sort of schizophrenic feel as Seattle on a smaller scale.

Cincinnati has the single most urban neighborhood in the Midwest outside of Chicago (Over-the-Rhine) but it falls off pretty dramatically in terms of urbanity after that.

St. Louis has a truly massive area of moderate levels of urbanity/walkability, but the urban renewal era (and white flight) took a heavy toll on its historic fabric.

Cincy and St. Louis. They're the only metros with sizable intact pre-auto walkable areas.

Minneapolis doesn't have very high quality pre-auto fabric.

Champaign-Urbana.

it has one more Urban than anyone else.

also, Kansas City. the big one, not the little one.

There's a several of them; Indy, Detroit, Minneapolis, KCMO, St. Louis, Cleveland and Cincinnati stand out. Louisville if you want to count that...

Indy, to me, might have the worst pound-for-pound urbanity in the Midwest. Their densest neighborhoods are pretty unremarkable, streets are crazy-wide and everything looks a bit ramshackle.

And, yeah, I would also say Louisville, Pittsburgh and Buffalo, alongside Cincy and St. Louis, but I know most will say these don't count.

agree with this statement. minneapolis does the best with what it has, as does milwaukee on a smaller scale. st. louis and cincinnati make some big moves that may exceed what is found in the first two in particular and very interesting ways, but the whole isn't as cohesive. st. louis had the most to start with of them all and doesn't win any prizes for doing the best with what it has, really, with some exceptions. cincinnati doesn't have very much of a regional metropolis feel like the other three, but takes the prize for the most impressive single urban neighborhood (and best overall vernacular and build quality with st. louis coming in second) in my opinion.

if i were going to pick one to crown, i'd go with the twin cities. st. louis has some great swaths across nine miles of urban and pre-war suburban fabric (actually goes further than that along the old commuter lines), but downtown is still too drowsy.

That is the correct answer. . .

. . .

I've never been but I've always assumed Columbus had some urbanity simply based on size... can anyone confirm or deny?

Is Ohio considered Midwestern? Then yeah, Cincinnati is up there for sure. I'd probably lump that in more with the Appalachian region personally though.

Columbus also seems to have a pretty solid & healthy core.

cincinnati is 100% midwestern in the same way as st. louis...it's just a different mode of midwestern than say milwaukee.

cleveland had all that, but it too was chopped up by abandonment, teardowns and urban prairie.

younger people forget when it looked like when it was much more intact/connected than the neighborhood nodes visitors have to figure out today.

these days minneapolis/st. paul is a clear leader in modern urbanity.

Yep.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...States.svg.png

I would say that Ohio starts to really be more "midwestern" from around the Columbus area west. Basically, if you took a N-S line down the middle of the state. That pretty much coincides with where the land gets much flatter, and intensively agricultural -- the "corn belt" I guess.

NE OH is more similar to western PA/western NY and SE OH is more similar to western PA/WV. But once you get to Columbus (or Toledo), there's a palpable difference.

yeah, the vast region is very far from being uniform.

Eh, I don't really agree with that. Cincinnati is very hilly and looks more like SE Ohio, while parts of NE Ohio are very much intensely agricultural.

Architecturally and topographically, Cleveland and Pittsburgh are very dissimilar. They have somewhat similar immigration patterns, with way more in the way of Eastern and Southern Europeans than cities like Columbus or Cincinnati. But Cleveland has a much, much larger African American population than Pittsburgh, and also has a pretty sizable Latino (predominantly Puerto Rican) community, while Pittsburgh has a minuscule Latino community. Demographically, Cleveland seems to be like Detroit meets Pittsburgh.

To answer the OP's question, I can think of several cities that could lay claim to being the most urban non-Chicago city in the midwest:

- St. Louis has a pretty impressive corridor from downtown out to Clayton. Lots of high rises and dense neighborhoods around this corridor and some very pleasant and walkable urban neighborhoods.

- Cincinnati has the most impressive core neighborhood in the midwest (imo), but topography helped to contain the intensely urban stuff to the basin, and urban renewal took out a huge chunk of those basin neighborhoods. Outside of those areas, Cincinnati definitely has some great urbanity, but the city functions more like a collection of towns than a big, cohesive city. Definitely doesn't feel as 'big city' as other midwestern cities.

- Columbus probably has the most in-tact, cohesive walkable urban corridor in the midwest outside of Chicago. High Street from downtown to north of OSU's campus is very impressive and dense. The neighborhoods flanking High are fairly dense, but mostly consist of detached housing and leafy neighborhoods. Also, outside of High Street, there isn't much else in Cbus that I would categorize as particularly urban, and their downtown is still incredibly sleepy and dead, though improving.

- Cleveland has the rail transit and there are parts of the city that do feel like the large city it used to be. Lakewood has a pretty high population density and the wall of high rises along the lake give a pretty 'big city' vibe. Shaker Square and Ohio City are other Cle neighborhoods that give off a big city feeling, in large part thanks to the rail. But the city as a whole has lost so much, and there isn't much in the way of unbroken vitality.

- Detroit's downtown probably feels the most significant of any non-Chicago midwestern city. Outside of downtown, the city has lost most of its functioning urban neighborhoods, and much of the city wasn't even developed in the classic urban sense, anyway. Neighborhoods like Palmer Park give a snapshot of what once was, but they're outliers in the city that is mostly characterized by detached, single family homes.

* Never spent any appreciable time in MSP or Milwaukee, so can't speak to those. Indy has a nice downtown but nothing urban outside of it. Kansas City is cool, but never feels very intensely urban to me. Everything else in the midwest is too small to warrant discussion in this thread, I think.

None? I don't really like the question, but I'll play along. No other city in the Midwest has anything more than a modest train system, unlike the major cities in the northeast corridor, which, if not a cause, is definitely a symptom of the urban state of Midwest cities.

I've set foot in four major Midwest cities in the past 15 years: Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis. If you include Pittsburgh, five. Of those, ignoring Chicago, the most vibrant was Minneapolis, with Pittsburgh as a solid second place. Cleveland and Detroit seemed about even, but Cleveland is the one I haven't been to in the longest so memory is fuzzy.

Detroit (obviously).

Yes, Cincy is an Ohio River valley city, so it’s going to resemble others of the region, like SE OH, Pittsburgh/SW PA. But outside of the river valley, the flat land/agricultural topography holds true in the surrounding region. And much of PA is heavily agricultural (both western and eastern PA) (and update NY for that matter) like NE OH and SE OH. But not predominantly grain/corn. It’s not the “corn belt”... which is an accepted proxy for”Midwest”.

Pittsburgh is an ethnic anomaly due to completely missing out on immigrants in the 70s-2000s since that was the same time of steel’s collapse. It was Depression era economics in Pittsburgh for around 30 years... and it did not see sizable influx of Latinos or Asians. And it’s Appalachian. It’s isolated from other large population centers where Latinos would likely migrate from. Cleveland’s Latino population derives from NYC migration and Chicago/Detroit migration. Very similar to what is seen in cities Buffalo and Erie.

But NE OH (Cleveland area) is not like Pittsburgh that much anyway (I never claimed it was). Its more like NW PA and western NY. SE OH is more like SW PA (Pittsburgh)... Appalachian.

It's an outlier in the Midwest due to it's geography much like Pittsburgh is in the NE. But Cincinnati still feels Midwest with a southern tinge to it. Cleveland feels a lot like Buffalo. Buffalo is 'northeast' but differs somewhat from other Upstate NY cities like Syracuse, Albany and Utica which feel more New Englandish the further east you go.

Steubenville, OH.

Oh yeah, Cincinnati is definitely a Midwestern city with some cultural influences from the South, and some architectural influences from the Northeast. I've always gotten purely Midwestern vibes from Cleveland, and I'm not really sure what about it makes it feel Eastern. If it's just the cultural influences from the immigrants they've received over the years, then I guess Detroit and Chicago are also not Midwestern. From the architecture to the accent to the layout of the city...it's Great Lakes Midwest through and through.

Of course, Clevelanders are quick to point out that they were 'part of Connecticut' hundreds of years ago when the population of NE Ohio was a few dozen people. They'll say that the 'Connecticut influence' is still there because there are 3 buildings from the Connecticut Reserve that are still standing and look vaguely similar to buildings you might find in a small town in CT. But I have always thought this is just something they say to make themselves feel more...prestigious? As if Cleveland is somehow Greenwich on Lake Erie. I've always found this preposterous. :shrug:

lol, yes, it is preposterous. By that measure, Detroit was part of Massachusetts. Or better yet, France, since that city was originally settled and plotted out by the French.

Is that the town known for its culture of rape?

Minneapolis always seems to be a notch or 2 further ahead than other places in the US midwest.

Columbus had Urban Meyer.

I'd agree with this. I never got the connection either, at least in a general land use/cultural feel context. Cleveland is actually a newer metro which boomed concurrent with Detroit and Buffalo booms.

Also, I always find it odd that Connecticut = prestigious and NJ = working class, when they have almost indistinguishable household income, education and demographics. Both have town greens, Portuguese, railroad suburbs, colonial relics, beach towns, etc. They're about as similar as any two states, yet they have polar opposite reputations. NJ = chemical plants and Eyetalians and Connecticut = country-club WASPs.

I would say Milwaukee, even though it does not have rail transit. And Pittsburgh, which straddles the Midwest/east coast. I haven't been to Minneapolis in ages. Columbus does have a okay downtown core and a few neighborhoods near downtown, but it is a sprawling, car oriented city for the most part and it's downtown does not have much retail (it had a big mall but it was shuttered years ago and now the major retail is on the edges of the city (along with strip malls and some of the close in neighborhoods/suburbs with their own retail).

cleveland feels very midwest to this midwestern. in fact overall it feels newer than st. louis (theres no weird creole markets, etc) excepting the pre-war rail-serviced, orthodox jewish suburbs which remind me of metro st. louis.

Quantitatively we can consider population density and fraction of people commuting by driving alone. Here is some data from the 1-year 2017 ACS (central city only):

https://i.imgur.com/gTwAJzc.png

Based on these metrics, Minneapolis is a clear winner, with Madison and Milwaukee being runners-up.

Milwaukee east of the Milwaukee river is quite urban.

nice yes, i’m pro-data driven shit. corresponds approximately with my conclusions excluding cincinnati.

It's interesting how Detroit, St. Louis and Cleveland have have both very similar drive alone modal shares (~70%) and densities (~5k /sq mile)

Modal share and density, while helpful stats, aren't really definitive. Calgary has significantly higher density and transit share than, say, Philly. Would anyone seriously argue Calgary is more urban than Philly? How about Winnipeg more urban than Boston or Chicago?

Urbanity is a subjective concept largely based on street-level feel. Minneapolis, IMO, doesn't quite have it.

My gut was saying Minneapolis and not because of some random percent ride alone metric.

I agree with you for the most part (there are just statistics that tend to correlate with urban areas), but I don't have enough on-the-ground experience in every city to make qualitative comparisons. Streetview helps, but it's not easy go get a sense of scale.

That said, which of these (all in Chicago) do you consider the most urban:

A) https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8671...7i16384!8i8192

vs.

B) https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8725...7i16384!8i8192

vs.

C) https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9181...7i16384!8i8192


Canadian cities (and Minneapolis) have a lot of streetscapes like A and much fewer of B and C (owing to the age of development, obviously) but arguably they are all urban typologies.

I think we'd really need to specify if we were talking about aesthetically urban which would be the domain of appearance and "feel", or functionally urban which would pertain to how people move around and interact with their environment. Functional urbanism would very strongly rely on stats such as population density and transportation modal share while largely ignoring appearance, while the opposite would be true of aesthetic urbanism. Of course there's a correlation between places that appear urban aesthetically and places that function in an urban manner, but as you pointed out it's not a direct relationship.

Indeed, places like OTR in Cincinnati or the Historic Third Ward in Milwaukee are almost more like museums or playgrounds than functional neighborhoods.

As someone who travels the Midwest extensively, I would say outside of Chicago, that Cincinnati and St. Louis appear most urban to me. Now if you include Pittsburgh as mid-west, you would have to also add it in the equation also. Its interesting these three cities are river towns, it appears that outside of Chicago, other lakefront cities have not been able to interwove their lands abutting the lakes into great urban fabric.

Pre-auto fabric is becoming less of a meaningful marker of urbanity as time goes on because we are building proper urban buildings again. Minneapolis has added hundreds of new urban format midrises over the last decade, which is why its population has grown by 10% since the 2010 census. There has been enough new development that it is a different city now than it was even three or four years ago. It is now basically the city Seattle was in 2010 in terms of fabric.

I had to go to Columbus last May for a business trip, spent a week there. Spent time in Worthington and Dublin as well. These leafy burbs honestly did feel like Connecticut to me. Worthington in particular.

I didn’t get the impression that downtown Columbus was used to its potential. I was there during the NHL playoffs, when Columbus hosted the B’s. The crowds were light, there was no real festive feel. I get that hockey doesn’t have the same cultural weight in Ohio that it does in New England, but If I hadn’t known better as a huge hockey fan, it would have been hard to tell an event of any importance was even happening. Downtown looks healthy enough, no abandonment issues, light volumes of new construction, clean. But it’s clearly not a destination.

Short North was probably the liveliest place near downtown. German Village had some killer brick vernacular that’s stylistically different from Boston’s Federalist rows yet still evoked Charlestown or lower Beacon Hill. I loved it.

Not Chicago, eh? Evanston, IL has it all: a vibrant downtown with high end retail, a heavy rail system, commuter rail, apartment neighborhoods, etc.

If that’s being cheeky, how about Madison?

Being serious, though, midwestern big cities other than Chicago are great, but they really need to improve their downtown retail and dining options. The comparison to Seattle is sobering; Seattle was smaller than most of the Midwestern cities we’re debating in 1940 but, today, its downtown is more vibrant than all of them by a wide margin.

My biggest beef with MN is all of those elevated walkways between buildings downtown.

On the surface it appears that that was a bad urban planning choice

Well, 1940 was 80 years ago!

Every city has changed since then. Unfortunately many in the midwest declined since then. Some declined and bounced back to become even better than before, think Boston, New York. Some have steadily grown, think Los Angeles and some have steadily declined, think Detroit, Pittsburgh etc.

Isn't it amazing what 80 years of growth will do compared to 80 years of decline?

Downtown is a secondary issue here

Generally in the us the cities that are adding the most urban format infill midrises are those with the highest rate of increasing urbanity.

Houston inner loop, dc, Austin, portland, Chicago west loop, Minneapolis are at the forefront of this trend.

In the Midwest, maybe Columbus.

Meanwhile Milwaukee’s downtown, St. Louis central west end, and Cincinnati’s OTR are architecturally extraordinary. But they lack the new investments in sufficient numbers to make these assets yield the benefits they should.

But these aren't equivalent to prewar urbanity. Dallas has probably built like 50k in-town units, but doesn't appear notably more urban than earlier. It's more like dense suburbia imported to low-value core land to serve demographic trends like later family formation and less money for down payments. It's Phase 1 to the eventual Plano McMansion.
They're underutilized, yes. But they have the requisite bones, which are irreplaceable and unreplicable.

To me, yeah, B and C are far more urban, because they have the prewar bones. I recently stayed a few nights right around A, and while very pleasant, park-filled and family-friendly, that corner of the South Loop did not strike me as particularly appealing to hard-core urbanites. Lots of townhouses with attached 2 car garages on quiet streets and giant podium towers.

My son had a blast at multiple playgrounds on a South Loop street with this typology. Great in-town location, not particularly urban:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8640...7i13312!8i6656

IMO there are multiple typologies that prefer urban cores. Some prefer urban cores because they're intensely dense and active, and polar opposite of suburbia, some prefer because they're convenient to work, going out and friends. The South Loop generally attracts more of the latter.

minneapolis! the other toronto.....honestly its the only midwestern city id be excited to move to. lots and lots of quality neighborhoods and tons of outdoor sh!t to do. their park system and bike network is amazing...

I defy anyone to compare inner loop Houston today to 30 years ago and tell me midrise construction everywhere hasn’t contributed to gains in urbanity.