KEITH MYERS -- URBAN PLANNER PROFILE

KEITH MYERS

By Steve Wright

Keith A. Myers grew up in exurban Cleveland during the late sixties/early seventies area of urban renewal with and middle class exodus from big cities.

His dad worked in downtown Cleveland, but his family lived in the next county over – far from the “Mistake of the Lake,” the sooty Great Lakes city where the polluted river burned, the baseball team was a joke, the school system was broken and a once-thriving industrial hub went bankrupt.

The prevailing wisdom at the time was that cities were dark and dangerous places -- all of which was exemplified in the great cult classic movie Escape from New York,” said the principal of Columbus, Ohio-based MSI Design. “The movie captured the feeling about cities at that time. In spite of that, I used to love to go downtown to my dad's office…I never really felt threatened by the city, Cleveland, in spite of its appearance and reputation. In some ways, that made it more of an adventure.”

The award winning urban planner spent his early professional years in the Mariemont, the fabled 1920s master-planned community on the outskirts of Cincinnati on the Ohio River.

Mariemont was a sharp contrast to suburban Cleveland with its village setting, wealth of parks, red brick Norman, Georgian and Tudor buildings, bell tower, concourse, village square – and one of the few elected town criers in America.

“I moved to Mariemont in 1980 and couldn't understand why we were not building villages, towns and cities on the same principles that seemed to work so well in the past,” he said.

TOMORROW: The Arena District in Columbus OH

Wright has written for a living for 25 years, with nearly 5,000 published articles. He lives in historic Little Havana and is very active in Miami’s urban issues. He and his wife of 20 years also are involved in making new and old towns more accessible for people with disabilities.