Looking at Cities

Reading this detailed guide to analyzing cities immeadiately made me begin thinking about the city I live in. It is interesting to look at the udistrict in particular for its types of housing and how they indicate a change in living trends. I'm not really sure how old a lot of the houses are in the u-district, but I do know that the house I am currently renting is about 97 years old. I would imagine that many of the other houses aren' much more than 50 years older than that. At the time they were built, the owners must have been very affluent based on the size and building materials for a lot of the houses. What were originally large single family homes have now been converted into multi unit dwellings. The article indicated that this could be because the u-district has in the course of the last 100 years become a less desirable place to live. I think that the reason for this is more based on the necessity of smaller more compartmentalized student housing. Although this seems somewhat obvious, it is still interesting to think about the different possibilities.

The other part that I found interesting is how the public transportation system is reflection of how people view the importance of downtown. The fact that we use buses rather than subways means that our downtown is less important and central for many people when compared to cities that do have subways. I do definitely get this feeling in Seattle. The actual downtown area is very small, with a much more distributed network of centrality with smaller econmic centers such as bellevue, wallingford, and freemont spread out, rather than focused in the downtown area.

Some questions after reading this are:
1) how would you describe downtown seattle using the methods of anaylsis that are described in this article?
2) how would you describe the u-district in the context of this article?