Check out Alain Bertaud's Master Class lecture at CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India. You can also see the talk I gave the same day: Pro: When you speak to architects as a practitioner, they call it a "master class", which is very flattering. Cons: Don't try to follow Alain Bertaud. … [Read more...]
Book Review: (de)Coding Mumbai
On a recent visit to CEPT University, I received the generous gift of a few new books from CEPT University Press. One of these, (de)Coding Mumbai by Sameep Padora and Shreyank Khemalapure, is an attractive study of how Mumbai's architecture is a product of its building and zoning codes. The … [Read more...]
The Master Plan: An Obsolete Urban Management Tool
Most master plans are a costly effort by a team of temporary consultants, spread over two to three years, to prepare a blueprint that is usually obsolete as soon as it is completed. This article appeared originally in Caos Planejadoand is reprinted here with the publisher's … [Read more...]
Are New Cities Necessary?
Promotors of recently developed cities ranging from Nusantara, the freshly built capital of Indonesia, to Neom, Saudi Arabia’s futurist urban paradise, advertise them as breakthroughs in urban living. But does the world need new cities? This article appeared originally in Caos Planejadoand is … [Read more...]
Retrospective: Sites & Services
The World Bank's "sites and services" generated many projects on which I spent several years of my professional life. Here's a description: Sites and services projects are government-sponsored packages of shelter related services, which range from a minimal level of "surveyed plot" to an … [Read more...]
Dataviz links: Over time, across space
Great links for quick data dives: The Historical Housing Prices Project gives rents and home prices from 1890 - 2006 for US cities. It's based on newspaper listings and was led by Ronan C. Lyons, Allison Shertzer, and Rowena Gray. I've added Ronan's blog, Time & Space, to the links below.City … [Read more...]
Mumbai upzoning
Geetika Nagpal's job market paper, written with Sahil Gandhi, shows that a 2017 increase in allowed floor area ratio in Mumbai had a tremendous impact on affordability by accidentally improving the economics of smaller apartments. (Note that the authors are updating the paper, so some of the … [Read more...]
Responsive Cities in the arena: Brazil floods
Update: Support the recovery work of Responsive Cities Institute by donating via PayPal. Last year, Alain Bertaud and I traveled to Porto Alegre and spent time learning from the excellent architects and urbanists at the Responsive Cities Institute - you can think of it as a practitioner-led, … [Read more...]
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