Four years ago, Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase wrote, or led the effort to write, ten principles of shared mobility for livable cities. read more »
Suburbs
Auto 30-Minute Commutes Substantially Top Transit
Advances in information technology have made it possible to provide estimates of job access by transportation mode in metropolitan areas. The University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory has positioned itself as the leader in this field. read more »
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Meet me in St. Louis: When One Golden Gate Closes, Another May Open
Sacramento politicians and the urban growth lobby they so diligently serve have created a narrative that there is something very wrong with living in (or wanting to live in) a single-family neighborhood. Single-family neighborhoods are -- so the narrative goes -- “racist,” “immoral,” and “evil.” read more »
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The Affordable-Housing Industrial Complex
Since 1932, Congress has passed dozens of laws aimed at making rental housing and homeownership more affordable. Many of these laws created new programs while few of the older programs were abolished. read more »
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Building on Jacobs: The City Emergent; Beyond Streets and Buildings
“Almost all theories of the city are largely qualitative, developed primarily from focused studies on specific cities or groups of cities supplemented by narratives, anecdotes, and intuition.” Geoffrey West, Scale, 2017
This recent quote recalls Jane Jacobs’s seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) read more »
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Sustainable Suburbia
Visionary images of resilient cities that save the US, or even the world, from climate change. Of downtowns transformed by technology into smart ecotopias. Of urban oases that sprout from scratch in the deserts of the Southwest or the Middle East or Mars. read more »
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This Might Be a Good Time for Creative Zoning
No matter what else it may have already caused and/or will continue to cause in the coming future, one thing that we know for sure is that the COVID pandemic has done is alter how people will approach land use planning and development issues in the coming years, possibly even decades. read more »
Reply to Elizabeth Farrelly: Suburbia Not Kulturstadt
Recently on Twitter I came across a post about the NSW Panning Minister's announcement banning dark roofing for detached houses in fringe housing estates to minimise the heat island effect. Scrolling down the comments, I noticed one by the Sydney Morning Herald’s anti-suburban architecture critic, Elizabeth Farrelly. read more »
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Census Data Confirm Migration from Big CIties
Eight of the ten American cities with more than one million people lost population in 2020, according to estimates released by the Census Bureau. Note that these are only estimates; not official 2020 census numbers. read more »
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The Working Poor Need Workhorse Vehicles
With more than forty percent of the EV’s in the entire country being in California at the end of 2020, the EV popularity in California has gotten President Biden so excited to want the rest of the country to follow California’s lead that Biden issued a new executive order that pushes for half of all new cars sold in America by 2030 read more »
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