Urban Issues

I’ve written some versions of this topic many times over the years. Now it’s time for the latest installment.  read more »

Walk through any major American city today—San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle—and you’ll see the same troubling pattern: sidewalks turned into encampments, public parks ov  read more »

Donald Trump’s reviled takeover of the DC police and his earlier deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles serve as a direct challenge  read more »

What do cities reveal about us? Not just our engineering or art, but our longings—what we value, what we revere, how we choose to live together.  read more »

It’s been over a decade since I wrote the original “screwed generation” piece for Newsweek. In the subsequent years, the idea that younger people face a difficult future has become commonplace in public debate.  read more »

I’m an urbanist. If you’re reading this, you probably are one too. You, like me, want to make cities better places. That’s at the absolute core of being an urbanist.  read more »

I recently experienced Edward Burtynsky’s The Great Acceleration at New York’s International Center of Photography—and it was nothing short of remarkable.  read more »

Housing is now as hot an issue in politics as the shape of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans (or genes). The socialist Zohran Mamdani’s stunning primary win in New York came largely off the back of concerns about housing affordability.  read more »

If there's one thing that really bothers me in urbanist circles, it's that there's no real agreed upon definition for what exactly is "urban". This is a fundamental problem, because it leads to differing sides always talking past each other, often using the same data to drive home vastly different points. Could astronomers and astro-physicists talk to each other if there were similar debates about what "space" is?  read more »

The breakdown in relations between the US’s top teacher’s union, the National Education Association (NEA), and the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group focused on tackling anti-Semitism, reflects a deeper and dangerous takeover of education by determined activists.  read more »