A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing through the library for something fun to read, and stumbled upon “Get Urban” by Kyle Ezell. For those of you who don’t know him, Kyle is a cool local urban enthusiast who is not only a published author, but also an instructor at OSU in the City & Regional Planning Department, a Short North resident, and a great guy full of big ideas.
Anyway, “Get Urban” was released 5 years ago, and written and researched a few years leading up to that. It’s written to be a bit of an all-encompassing guidebook for someone contemplating a relocation from the suburbs to a more urban neighborhood. The vast majority of the book is written in a manner that doesn’t speak too negatively of suburban lifestyles, but instead focuses on the positives of an urban lifestyle, which should be a welcome change from some of the more heated urban vs suburban conversation that typically occur on this topic.
For someone like me, the guidebook portion doesn’t serve a huge purpose, as I’m already living through what the book is providing instructions for, but I still really enjoyed a lot of the material relating to the breakdown of urban neighborhood classifications. The four main ones being: Post-Industrial Urbs, Eclectic Urbs, Garden Urbs and Blank Canvas Urbs. A local example of each would be Franklinton, The Short North, German Village, and The King Lincoln District, respectively. Those last three are all actual examples listed in the book. I had a great time reading and comparing some of the descriptions of similar types of neighborhoods existing in other cities all across the US that Kyle researched for the book. If anything, reading “Get Urban” has cause me to want to take vacations to cities like Omaha and Milwaukee and Nashville and Baltimore and every other city home to a few interesting and unique (and sometimes overlooked) neighborhoods.
Anyway, if you’re someone like me who is already fairly familiar with the joys of urban living, I’d still recommend picking up this book for a light read (or maybe just borrowing it from the library once I return it) and giving it a good sampling, especially in the chapters about the interesting example cities.
But If you are someone considering an urban relocation, or even just mildly interested in city life, this book is definitely worth a full read, and I’d even recommend buying a copy if you can find it (perhaps at the Book Loft or on Amazon). Perhaps if you bribe Kyle with an offer to take him out for a cup of coffee, you might even get him to sign your copy!