Newgeography.com - Economic, demographic, and political commentary about places

Dear Sputla, please burn more coal.

The Minister of Electricity, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, known fondly as Sputla, recently said that if he had his way, he would go and restart the Komati Power Station  read more »

I try hard to give people insights into trends affecting our world. One of them is the way that declining birth rates will ultimately translate into shrinking cities.  read more »

With office districts and tower blocks losing their lustre, we need to rethink what cities are for. It’s time to create better neighbourhoods where people will want to spend their time.  read more »

Global cobalt demand soared with the advent of cell phones and laptop computers. It exploded with the arrival of electric vehicles and now is skyrocketing in tandem with government EV mandates and subsidies.  read more »

Over the weekend, the publisher Puffin announced that it had scrubbed language deemed “insensitive” and “non-inclusive” from the works of Roald Dahl, the classic children’s book author  read more »

Amtrak carried 492 million passenger-miles in May 2023, which was just 86.4 percent of the 569 million passenger-miles it carried in the same month of 2019, according to Amtrak’s latest  read more »

The state of California Department of Finance (DOF) has issued interim population projections indicating that in 2060, there will be 39,508,000 residents in the state.  read more »

I often check in on NewGeography.com, a website led by southern California-based urban studies professor and famed suburbanist Joel Kotkin.  read more »

The rise of artificial intelligence may be rescuing the tech oligarchy, but its current trajectory could hasten our steps towards what virtual reality guru Rony Abovitz calls ‘computational autocracy’.  read more »

At the June meeting of the Legislature’s Joint Transportation Committee a consultant presented a review of Ultra High-Speed Rail studies that have been done for the I-5 corridor. As is often the case, most of the findings were couched in language crafted to avoid offending anyone and included many caveats about data availability and assumptions that need to be further refined. Despite that, the findings cast doubt on the feasibility of the proposal. Key findings include:  read more »