LAX is always under construction or renovation –in sometimes valiant, sometimes halfhearted, usually halting attempts to spruce up L.A.’s “nine terminals linked by a traffic jam.” It’s one traffic jam that may finally end.
Art Review: Ed Ruscha and the Great American West
No artist has ever depicted Los Angeles like Ed Ruscha. It’s worth a trip to San Francisco to see the de Young’s retrospective.
A Philadelphia Solution to California’s Housing Woes
As California cities agonize over how to house everyone, they are missing out on a typology with countless reasons to recommend it.
Planners in an Age of Globalization
CP&DR’s Josh Stephens caught up with Khanna at the Milken Institute Global Conference to talk about how city form – and the people who guide it – in California and elsewhere can contribute to these global connections.
Rent Control Gains Traction Amid Housing Crisis in Bay Area
Over the past year, cities have again turned to what is, in many ways, the tool of last resort to preserve affordable housing.
Renters vs. Tenants: A Distinction with a Difference
I think of renters expansively, as more than just parties who signed a piece of paper. Renters are demographic group, and an enormous one at that.
Intellectual Tourism, Near and Far: Review of ‘The Geography of Genius’
Organized chronologically, each chapter travels to a different city and investigates a different type of genius, spanning some 3,000 years. There’s a fun, parlor-game quality to anticipation, both of what city will come next and of what might qualify as “genius” for Weiner.
California Needs ‘Minimum Housing’ to Go Along with Minimum Wage
Minimum wage increases don’t mean much if housing supply does not increase.
Fetishizing Families: Review of ‘The Human City’
Kotkin has long been a contrarian and critic of contemporary planning — sometimes a perceptive and welcome one, especially when urbanists, myself included, have gotten too cute or too smug. “The Human City” is probably his most comprehensive critique and surely his most off-putting.
Los Angeles’ Moral Failing
urking behind every data point and every policy are forces like curiosity, relationships, open-ness, diversity, civic self-image, and values. These factors are often disregarded by short-sighted wonks and bureaucrats not because they’re not crucial but because they aren’t easily quantified.
Ballot Initiative Takes Aim at Planning in Los Angeles
The number of people who would likely vote in favor of the city’s current system of long-range planning and project approvals in the City of Los Angeles hovers around zero. But that is not exactly the question at hand.
Hyperloop and Hyperbole
Where the Falcon 9 goes, they don’t need roads. But Hyperloops still need rights of way.
Theater Review: Urban Planning Takes Center Stage in ‘If/Then’
As the central character in the Broadway musical “If/Then,” currently on a national tour that begins in California, Elizabeth Vaughan may be the most famous urban planner in the country.
Mobility Plan Nudges Los Angeles Towards New Transportation Modes
The City of Los Angeles has, finally, formulated an ambitious vision — some say too ambitious — to redefine nearly every facet of mobility in the city.
Book Review: Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change
Tactical urbanism’s entry into the mainstream comes in the form of the enthusiastic volume Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change.
Los Angeles Metro Tackles First Mile, Last Mile Problem
The challenge Metro now faces – on a scale arguably larger than that of any other major city – is of getting riders to and from its trains and buses.
Cities Seize Chances to Avoid CEQA Review through Voter Initiatives
In the cities of Carson and Inglewood, competing sponsors of stadium proposals are employing, simultaneously, a newly legitimized tactic to exempt their projects from review under the California Environmental Quality Act.