Welcome to the Corner Side Yard!

Thanks for stopping by! I’m Pete Saunders, publisher of the Corner Side Yard. I started CSY on Substack in April 2024, but I’ve been blogging about cities online since 2012. Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to have been published widely, in traditional outlets such as Planning Magazine, the Chicago Reader, Crain’s Chicago Business, the Detroit Free Press, the Guardian of London and Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as online at the Urbanophile, New Geography, Planetizen and Huffington Post, among others. I’m also a practicing urban planner with more than twenty years’ experience in planning, economic development, and community development, in the Chicago metropolitan area.

If you’re looking for a unique perspective on urbanism, you’ve found the place.

Unique? How so?

I came into urbanism on a different path than many others who found the field. As a Black kid growing up in 1970s and ‘80s Detroit, I wanted to find a profession that sought solutions for cities with challenges like it. Along the way to getting my master’s degree in urban planning and jumping into the profession, I found two perspectives to be lacking in the urbanism sphere — that of people of color living in cities, and that of people living in the nation’s Rust Belt. Since the 1990s the model of successful urbanism has been the knowledge economy driven model of America’s coastal metropolises, or the domestic migration fueled growth of Sun Belt cities. But exactly why have cities in the nation’s midsection lagged behind? What happens to cities that have neither the strong economies or sunshine to spark revitalization? That’s what a lot of the Corner Side Yard is about.

What you’ll find at CSY

Opinion and commentary on cities in the Midwest. You’ll find interesting pieces on the trends, politics, economies, developments and demographics impacting America’s middle ground, from Syracuse to Kansas City, and the Twin Cities to St. Louis.

Insight that comes from one Black man’s view of urbanism. I continually find that as an urbanist who is who I am and lives where I do, what is often good for thee is not (always) good for me. I view things through those prisms and offer my opinion.

Data-driven analysis on what’s happening in American cities. Of course, I might have my focal points but I strive to explore what’s happening across the country. What works in one place could very well work in another.

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.