Table of Contents
Contributors
Joel Warren Barna; Alan Field; Stephen Fox; Richard Ingersoll; David Kaplan; Deborah Morris; William F. Stern; Drexel W. Turner; Peter Waldman; and Bruce C. Webb.
Cite 22: Sick City: Growing Pains at the Texas Medical Center
Spring-Summer 1989
Editor’s Note
Cite 22 includes articles on a broad range of topics with no guest editor named. The following quote is from the cover article, "Sick City: Growing Pains at the Texas Medical Center," by Richard Ingersoll:
During the past five years Houston's building cranes have migrated en masse from the oncebooming downtown business district three miles south to the Texas Medical Center. With the bust in the oil-and-finance economy, developers and builders turned their attention to the relative stability of the health-care industries, and the majority of the 42 institutions located at the Texas Medical Center have initiated major physical expansions costing more than $1.5 billion. This will double the building area within the world's largest medical center. The name Texas Medical Center refers to both a district of Houston, known as the Medical Center, and an umbrella organization, which for the sake of clarity will be called the TMC. The hospitals, research laboratories, schools, and health organizations located at the Medical Center are federated but autonomous members of the TMC. The conflict between individual institutions and collective needs is clearly legible in the uncoordinated urban pattern of an area that contains Houston's third most significant concentration of buildings. The TMC's power is negligible compared to that of its members, and therein lies the chief deterrent to concerted planning - no plan will work beyond the degree to which the members themselves are willing to cooperate.