Urban Issues

In the middle of the 20th century, there was considerable interest in developing new communities (new towns). The interest was, to some degree, driven by the establishment of new towns in nations like the United Kingdom and France, where a number of projects had been completed by 1970.  read more »

Fred Siegel’s passing this weekend represented a huge loss not just for me personally but, more importantly, for all those concerned with the future of the United States, and particularly its cities.  read more »

I’ve always believed that the way you find your path to a certain direction in life determines quite a bit to your approach once on the path. Like a kid who was bullied by classmates becomes a boxer or martial artist and believes that the mastery of physical and mental discipline is the key to a good life. Or an introverted child who learns about a vastly larger world through books and believes that libraries can restore your soul. Sometimes you find a way to transcend from one life plane to another and you want the world to follow you.  read more »

Cities evolve by either expanding, deteriorating, tearing down or preserving. Some cities like Dallas have vast vacant land and other cities have little undeveloped land. Whether a city is expanding or declining, preservation is always healthy for a city.  read more »

Over five millennia, through pestilence, war, economic dislocation, and mass migrations, cities have demonstrated their essential resiliency. Yet at the same time, they have many times been transformed—becoming bigger, denser, and then less dense; shifting from having a walking- to a transit-based culture  read more »

Remote work has become a huge topic of conversation in the business and political world since the pandemic shutdowns. The shift to remote that the pandemic response precipitated has upended many of the conventions of how business is done in the United States.  read more »

The city of Portland announced yesterday that it received a $2 million federal grant to get it to ban gasoline (and, presumably, Diesel) delivery vehicles in a sixteen-block area of downtown Portland.  read more »

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 death last week of former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan is a reminder of both how low the city’s political culture has sunk and how strong leaders can help turn around a seemingly hopeless situation.  read more »

We are entering a new urban epoch, with the potential to disrupt city life in ways not unlike that created in the shift from an industrial to what Jean Gottman described in 1983 as the “transactional city.”  read more »