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 »
Suburbs
Understanding Neighborhoods and Architecture as Foundation of Understanding Preservation
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 »
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The Future of Cities: Next Generation Suburbs
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 »
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Things Are Different Downtown
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 »
Ex-Urbia
"Town and country must be married and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.”
— Ebenezer Howard, 1898"
All cities must evolve over time. Those that fail to do so end up, at best, like Venice, Vienna, or Florence: lifestyle and tourist hubs. This fate now awaits our greatest urban cores if they cannot address the demographic, social, and economic forces transforming the metropolitan landscape. read more »
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The Ghost of Ancient Rome Haunts America
The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000. read more »
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The Future of Cities: The Urban Future – The Great Dispersion
This chapter describes general urbanization trends in the United States and around the world, from 1950 to the present. Cities can be glamorous or exciting, but what matters most is how they facilitate higher incomes and standards of living. read more »
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Welcome to Austin
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 »
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Will Amtrak Benefit from Telecommuting?
Airlines carried 94 percent as many passengers in September 2022 as they did in September 2019, according to passenger counts published by the Transportation Security Administration. That’s up from 91 percent in August and 88 percent in September. read more »
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A Better Future
In earlier times, even with a soaring population, Americans knew how to accommodate housing demand. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we built cities from scratch along the frontier. The existing major urban centers—Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia—all expanded rapidly, both by density and expansion into land on the periphery. read more »
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