Book review of The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World.
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.
Big Thoughts for a New Era
Review of The Endless City
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.
Modernism In Fragments
Nathan Glazer’s From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City reveals how this influential social movement’s good intentions shaped the look of the 20th century. Anyone born in the second half of …
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.