cities

Analysts occasionally note that urban areas ("cities") are becoming larger and denser. This is only half right. It is true that most of the world's urban areas are becoming larger, with megacities like Delhi, Jakarta, Shanghai, Beijing and Manila adding more than five million people in the last decade and most other urban areas are growing, but not as fast.  read more »

The Atlantic's Alex Madrigal announces "The Beginning of the End for Suburban America," a wish and hope long dressed-up as reality by a well-placed few who believe that the "be - all and end - all" is living anywhere but the suburbs. This is not to suggest that there is anything wrong with living in the core urban core if that is what one wants to do.  read more »

Ryan Avent hits a home run, strikes out and earns a "yes, but," all in the same article ("One Path to Better Jobs: More Density in Cities") in The New York Times.  read more »

"Despite years of effort by city leaders to revitalize San Antonio’s downtown neighborhoods, thousands of residents flocked to sprawling subdivisions on the far North and West sides in the past decade, while the inner city lost residents."  read more »

The Pew Center on the States has released a new report examining the impact a potential federal default would have on state and municipal governments. The picture isn't pretty.  read more »

The so-called Chinese "Ghost Cities" have been the subject of a number of articles in recent months. There appears to be some truth in the reports, such as in the building of a near empty new city in Inner Mongolia (Ordos). There is also a good deal of hyperbole.  read more »

One thing that makes Smart Growth appealing is its language.  Terms like “livability” and “transit-oriented development” sound engaging, and “smart” growth is, frankly, self-flattering for its acolytes.  On transportation matters, advocates rarely declare their intent to reduce roadway capacity and divert money to transit projects (along with other auto unfriendly policies).  Instead, they say they are pursuing a “multi-modal” strategy to promote “transportation choice.”  read more »

Too much property reporting and media attention is given to our capital cities, and not enough effort is spent analysing our regional towns. 

As a result, too few investors understand Australia’s regional potential.  Right now, not only are many of our regional centres at the bottom of their cycle, but larger, long-term trends are at play.  Indeed, regional Australia is on the cusp of some big demographic changes.   read more »

Zhengzhou, Henan, China (March 28, 2011): In December, London’s Daily Mail reported that the Zhengzhou New Area was China’s largest “Ghost City.” A visit to the Zhengzhou New Area indicates exactly the opposite. Chinese “Ghost Cities” are large areas of new development that are virtually unoccupied. The most famous example is Ordos, a new and reportedly empty city, built to replace an older city in Inner Mongolia.  read more »

Data is now available for 20 of the nation’s 52 metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population. The early results indicate a pattern of accelerating dispersion of the population to the suburbs as is indicated in the table below. Thus far, historic core municipality growth has been approximately one-half the 1990s rate. During the 2000s, the historic cores have accounted for 8.8 percent of metropolitan growth, down nearly one-half from the 1990s rate.  read more »