In my previous post, I reviewed an old book on Japan while teasing a new one:If you read one book about Japan this year, it should be the beautiful, new Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazan and his Studiolab colleagues, including Joe McReynolds. But if you read … [Read more...]
Book Review: The Making of Urban Japan
If you read one book about Japan this year, it should be the beautiful, new Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazan and his Studiolab colleagues, including Joe McReynolds. But if you read two books about Japan, as you should, the second one should be André Sorensen's … [Read more...]
Are there places in America with diversity *and* equality?
The relationship between blacks and whites in the residential subdivisions out beyond the suburban ring suggests that middle-class people of both races recognize each other as equals. Among middleclass Americans, at least in the special circumstances of these Pennsylvania communities and others like … [Read more...]
California should indeed build new cities – but don’t let Nathan J. Robinson anywhere near them
Urbanist and YIMBY Twitter had a field day dunking on Nathan J. Robinson, whose essay in his publication Current Affairs (yesterday's tagline: "the one thing left that isn't disappointing") called for building new cities in California.The essay was a typical of the "anti-anti-NIMBY" genre: he … [Read more...]
Houston Impressions
Given that I've written a few papers about Harris County, Texas, and even helped republish a book about the city of Houston, it's a little embarrassing to admit I had never been there. So when a Canadian buddy suggested meeting up in the Bayou City for barbeque ahead of his conference there, I … [Read more...]
Why Should a Remote Worker Live in a City?
On Marginal Revolution today, Tyler Cowen responded to several questions from a commenter, Celestus, including one that more and more Americans are asking: “I’m a remote worker. Why should I live in a city? Heck, why should I live in a suburb?” Tyler’s answer was provocative: “You live in a city for … [Read more...]
Los Angeles is Dense, St. Louis is Varied
LA at DawnGeographer at English Wikipedia., CC BY 1.0I visited Los Angeles last month, and I fully intended to take transit from my aunt's house in Long Beach to a meeting downtown and another in Westwood. With a reality check from Google Maps, she talked me out of it and lent me her car. It's … [Read more...]
Getting to “Yes”
In laudable news, the Pew Charitable Trusts have backed a research project at NYU’s Furman Center to commission and publish work “to understand how specific land use reforms…have affected outcomes on the ground, especially with respect to residential development.”While looking forward to that … [Read more...]