In this interview for the “Planners Across America” series, Denver Planning Director Brad Buchanan details Denver’s efforts to reactivate the urban core with strong planning, transit investments, and new residential and commercial developments.
Book Review: ‘City by City’
Tortorici writes like Joan Didion’s cloying little sister, drawing monumental conclusions from vast stores of hearsay, personal experiences, and idle speculation.
Book Review: ‘Robert Moses: Master Builder of New York City’
It’s an odd feeling to see a historical figure represented visually, with his carriage, mannerisms, and emotions on display, often, in Moses’ case, with a beatific look of self-satisfaction.
Book Review: ‘Culture Crash’
‘Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class’ by Scott Timberg argues that cities must defend and support local culture in the face of the homogenizing effects of the creative class.
Top 10 Books – 2015
Planetizen is pleased to release its list of the ten best books in urban planning, design, and development published in 2014.
Explaining the Country’s Worst Rental Market
Surely, homeowners are entitled to worry about traffic, sight lines, city services, and all the rest. What I suspect, though, is that many homeowners really want to do is what any rational, self-interested actor would want when he or show owns a valuable asset. They want to constrain supply.
Planetizen’s Interchange Blog
Josh is a featured blogger on Planetizen.com, the online home of the world’s urban planning community.
Book Review: ‘How Paris Became Paris’
Anyone who writes about Paris naturally gets to draft off the city’s grandeur, so DeJean has an unfair advantage. Even so, she impressively achieves her goal: to explain Paris—specifically the extraordinary developments of the 1600s—without demystifying it.
The Original Big Digs
The gridlock in American cities today doesn’t compare to the crush on streets in Boston and New York City in the mid- to late-1800s. In The Race Underground, Doug Most chronicles the occasionally synchronous development of the nation’s first subways.
Top 10 Books – 2014
History of Future Cities is either a history book with an incredible urban sensibility or an urban book with an impressive grasp of history.
The Chemistry of Safer, Denser Cities
Reporter Kevin Drum recently revealed lead for what it was: one of the keys to the epidemic of American crime and violence that ruined our cities in the mid-20th century.
Shared Hardship and the Souls of Cities
No one moves to a place with a worst-case scenario in mind. But sometimes the worst-case scenarios are what define cities — and, paradoxically, perversely, sometimes for the better.
Planetizen Top 10 Books – 2012
Urban planning’s very own Don Draper has put quantitative analysis to a far more humane use. If Jane Jacobs wrote from the heart, Glaeser writes decidedly from the head.
Deconstructing A Tea Party Muse
For some lucky candidates, tomorrow’s election will have a storybook ending. Unfortunately for anyone who understands architecture, planning, and land use, that storybook will, in many cases, turn out to be The Fountainhead.
Starchitecture and Sustainability: Hope, Creativity, and Futility Collide in Contemporary Architecture
The question remains whether this functional movement also calls for a new formal movement, displaying materials and designs that hew towards ecological goals rather than individual visions. Uneasy about the prospect of privileging efficiency over art, many of today’s starchitects say no.
Starchitecture and Sustainability: Hope, Creativity, and Futility Collide in Contemporary Architecture
Whether the prosaic goals of the environmental movement can commingle with those of high art remains to be seen.
Histories of No History: Commodification and Urbanization in the American West
Cities do not, generally, sleep with the wrong people. They do not lapse into drug-addled despair or plunge headlong into creative fervor, emerging as sex symbols, dictators, or captains of industry. Reasons, therefore, abound for …
Breaking Down the Big Box
https://www.planetizen.com/node/35473 I originally read Big Box Swindle out of curiosity and latent disgust. I review it out of moral obligation. Author Stacy Mitchell takes aim at Walmart (neè Wal-Mart) and its fellow mega-retailers, whose transgressions …