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 …
Out Of The Enclave: Latinos Adapt, And Adapt To, The American City
Planning strategies geared towards auto-oriented cities, detached houses, and scarce public space has nonetheless given rise to a sometimes awkward and sometimes elegant relationship between Latinos and American cities, in which streetcorner entrepreneurship is but one example of Latinos’ efforts to make a home in someone else’s environment.
Small Town Apocalyptic Values
In World Made by Hand, James Howard Kunstler, infamous land-use curmudgeon and caustic hero of the New Urbanist set, presages this new era with a new subgenre: he has written perhaps the world’s first work of apocalyptic utopianism.
Black-Tie Optional: ‘Stepsister’ Cities Flourish in the Shadows
Stepsister cities are too small to be center cities but–unlike office-oriented edge cities or hypertrophic bedroom communities such as Mesa, Ariz., or Aurora, Colo.–they still lay claim to distinct local economies, urban character, and even urban sub-regions of their own.
The City as Factory
Perhaps the only urban planner ever to conduct fieldwork in stilettos, Currid slips past velvet ropes to argue in The Warhol Economy that New York City’s bounty resides not in the office tower but rather in the street, where art and creativity propel the city’s economy and distinguish it from the overgrown office parks that pass for American cities in the postindustrial age.
Light Rail Pits Planning Against Parenthood
The latest country heard from to oppose or otherwise gum up the Expo Line are the concerned parents and educators of L.A.’s Dorsey High School, past which the line would run.
Reading, Writing, And Planning: Urbanism In High School
If American cities are to heal themselves, and if the planning profession wants to attract the brightest students from the widest possible talent pool, urban planning must find its way into the high school curriculum.
Debunking, and Creating, Myths of Sprawl
At each turn, Bruegmann accepts that the current American landscape is more than all right, and argues that Americans should have chosen sprawl because sprawl is good and that no movement towards density, no matter how fervent, should obscure suburbia’s virtues.