Planning

The Future of Cities: Next Generation Suburbs

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Whether hundreds of years ago or today, the far-reaching environmental impacts of urbanization are because cities are “a node of pure consumption existing parasitically on an extensive external resource base.”  read more »

The Future of Cities: Utah and Salt Lake City Policy Innovations in Homelessness, Poverty, and Health

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The proper size of government permeates public policy discussions about homelessness, poverty, and health care. The left and right debate varying degrees of government involvement, typically failing to act and often deteriorating into a state of policy paralysis.  read more »

Calgary City Council: Reimagining the CBD

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In a previous post, I commented on the difficulties faced by the Calgary CBD (downtown), with its huge office vacancies resulting from the mid-decade oil bust  read more »

The 15 Minute City: An Idiotic Dream

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One of the arguments against single-family zoning is that separating housing from other uses forces people to drive to shops, work, and other destinations.  read more »

Ontario Land Use Policies Make Housing Unaffordable

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A poll by highly respected IPSOS, released by BILD-GTA, shows a strong awareness of the Greater Toronto Area’s severely unaffordable housing.  read more »

The Anti-Industry Industry

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The overwhelming majority of the money involved in the energy and climate debate in the U.S. today is not on the side of traditional energy producers. Instead, the money, the media, and the momentum are clearly on the side of the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex.  read more »

Big in Japan

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Well, it’s big in Japan.

That is what proponents of California’s high speed rail project say when asked about the whys and wherefores of the system. In other words, if it works somewhere else it will work here.  read more »

The Future of Cities: The Future of the Big American City Is Not Bright

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As COVID-19 begins to wane and become endemic, the question for policymakers, theorists, and Americans at large is: What is in store for our nation's big cities?  read more »

Welcome to Austin

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I'm going to make a little deviation from the bulk of the "Welcome to..." stories you see below, which mostly focus on South Side Chicago neighborhoods (the exceptions are Rosemont, in Chicago's northwest suburbs, and Park Forest, in the south suburbs).  read more »

Let Cities Be What They Want to Be

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An on-line site called the Dumber, er, I mean Intelligancer says that, for cities to survive, developers must be allowed to convert office buildings into housing.  read more »