In a city famous for the sudden shock of moving earth, the disrepair of Los Angeles’ sidewalks is a slow-motion disaster, threatening ankles, baby strollers, disabled pedestrians and the city budget alike.
College Rejection Doesn’t Have to Mean Frustration
Students can do a great deal, both before and after applying, to ensure that they maintain their sanity, embrace colleges’ decisions, and actually increase their chances of getting into their favored schools.
Los Angeles’ Slow Burn
For some urbanists in Los Angeles’ smart growth crowd, the only thing better than the destruction of one faux-Italian megablock apartment complex would be the destruction of four faux-Italian megablock apartment complexes.
New L.A. Kitchen Co-Working Space Is Good for Chefs, Foodies and Even the Health Department
L.A. Prep is hoping to help these food entrepreneurs compete, if not with Kraft and Nabisco, then at least with Amy’s and Annie’s.
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.
Not All NIMBYs Are Alike
The ethics of NIMBYism depend largely on the kind of environment that you’re trying to save.
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.
HuffPost Blog Series
This is Josh’s series of blogs on college counseling, college essays, and related topics.
Ask, Memory: Interrogation and the College Essay
A college application carries not the slightest fraction of the gravity of a life sentence. Even so, whenever I speak to students about college essays, I implore them to interrogate themselves, not as suspects but as witnesses. Witnesses to their own lives.
Transit Branding’s Virtuous Cycle
If a beer company can fool the public into throwing away its money on the same old product, then aren’t transit agencies doing the very same thing when they promoting and rebrand themselves?
Smart Branding Attracts the Masses to Mass Transit
Today, transit agencies are abandoning the passive approach to ridership. A confluence of design technologies, communication technologies, new trends in urban development and—perhaps most importantly—a cultural shift among young, smartphone-wielding city-dwellers has led to a new, more sanguine approach to the promotion of transit.
How College Applicants Can Go Beyond ‘Show Don’t Tell’
Analysis entails a discussion of reasons, consequences, processes, and connections to meaningful ideas.
The Dark Side of Environmental Quality
The trillions of points of light in the true night sky are no match for the mere billions on the ground. You know the culprits: streetlights; parking lots; gas stations; billboards; preening McMansions; “security” lighting; athletic fields; headlights….and on and on. It all piles up in icteritious “domes” that hover above every urban area in the country.
A Scholarship from the King
The King Abdullah scholarships aren’t merely “full rides.” They are entire support packages, including assistance for housing, travel, school materials, and even chaperones for women students.
An Accounting of Word Counts
The tailor’s great adage is, “measure twice, cut once.” That’s good advice when you’re working in silk, but irrelevant when ink and paper are in abundant supply. If a writer can’t get word counts out of his mind, I recommend one of two strategies…
California’s Immaculate Conception
At roughly the same time that the Founding Fathers were ringing the bells of revolution on the East Coast, California was nearly empty. It had no cities and only a modest fur-trading economy. It was a land crying out for a story — an empty soundstage, if you will. The role into which Serra grew, according to Steven W. Hackel in Junípero Serra: California’s Founding Father, was that of “a pioneer, a religious icon, and as a colonial imperialist.”
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.