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.
Minimum wage increases don’t mean much if housing supply does not increase.
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.
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.
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.
Where the Falcon 9 goes, they don’t need roads. But Hyperloops still need rights of way.
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.
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.
Tactical urbanism’s entry into the mainstream comes in the form of the enthusiastic volume Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change.
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.
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.
The City of Pasadena implemented metrics that measure projects’ impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act in terms of vehicle miles traveled rather than level of service.
In his recent book The New Geography of Jobs, Enrico Moretti, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, explains how cities promote innovation and, importantly, how innovation affects cities’ economies.
Sink or Swim was curated by Frances Anderton, known locally for hosting KCRW public radio’s DnA: Design & Architecture show. She spoke with CP&DR’s Josh Stephens.
Somehow, among all the laws, regulations, micro-, macro-, and global economic trends that impact on and emanate from our state, the overriding cause of California’s malaise is — wait for it — CEQA.
Density in L.A. presents an opportunity, and a tremendous one at that. It’s an opportunity to take all the people, buildings, capital, and spirit that are crammed in here at 6,100 people to the square mile and figure out how to design our buildings, transportation network, public spaces, and civic life in a way that makes the most of what we have.
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.
The ethics of NIMBYism depend largely on the kind of environment that you’re trying to save.