As the sobriety of 2009 has set in, this wild ride eased into a new reality: deficits, fare increases and cost-cutting strategies that are ushering in a new age of austerity that rivals any crisis that American public transit has ever experienced.
Unconventional Thinking
Why cities shouldn’t buy into the convention center economy.
Unconventional Thinking: Why Cities Shouldn’t Buy Into the Convention Center Economy
Two generations ago, city economies relied on money from the products they manufactured.Faraway customers purchased Fords, Zeniths, Maytags, and Levi’s, and their cash made its way to the factory foreman and his workers, who would …
Unconventional Thinking
Why cities shouldn’t buy into the convention center economy.
Horse Racing’s Decline May Be Cities’ Infill Opportunity
With attendance and handle down at California tracks – as at tracks across the country – rare opportunities are emerging to redevelop outsized parcels that sit amid heavily urbanized areas.
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 …
‘It’s Been a Blast But It’s Time to Go’
On many nights, after silence descended on the courts of Dillon Gym, the lights remained on in one first-floor office facing Little Courtyard. Inside, students and coaches gathered to throw darts and trade heckles. The gatherings were called coach’s meetings. No RSVP required.
Green Nudges: An Interview with Obama Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein
Legal scholar and avowed environmentalist Cass Sunstein, however, holds out hope that we, both individually and collectively, are not condemned to irrationality.
Shoup Shows Cities How to “Just Say No” to Parking
Cities that have no money for infrastructure investments, are crushed by byzantine planning codes, or are otherwise skittish about upsetting the status quo now have no excuse not to consider parking reform.
Putting Parking into Reverse
Professor’s Theories Influence Cities to Reconsider Pervasive Free Parking
Transportation Planning Warms Up to Climate Change
Strategies Sweeping and Small
Being Formed to Face Global Emergency
Seirra Magazine: Explore a Wild Place
And yet, beneath peaks that top 20,000 feet and where “bagging a fourteener” often just means that you got out of bed in the morning, the Salar de Uyuni presents an improbable 4,000-square-mile salt plain.
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.
Good Green Reads
Sierra asked leading professors to describe essential environmental books–and why they love them.
Subway Extension Would Make More than a Token Difference for L.A.
If I’m guilty of anything, it’s hometown pride, except without the real town. The subway might change that. I
China Redefines Big
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.