Several cities have jumped on the bandwagon of building Micro-apartments, a hot trend in apartment development. San Francisco and Seattle already have them. New York outlawed them, but is testing them on one project, and may legalize them again. Even developers in smaller cities like … [Read more...]
Some Inspiration from Guatemala
Turn the lights down, and the volume up. It's time for some Market Urbanist media, courtesy of some future urbanist leaders who's ideas may one day liberate our cities from yesterday's unenlightened technocrats. Architecture students at Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala participated … [Read more...]
Video: Sandy Ikeda on The Unintended Consequences of “Smart Growth”
I came across this video interview of economist Sandy Ikeda by the Mackinac Center. Sandy currently blogs at thinkmarkets and has contributed guest posts to Market Urbanism. I thought Sandy did a great job discussing many of the topics we cover in this site. Sandy is particularly insightful when … [Read more...]
Zoning as a Tool of Class Exclusion
In regards to zoning, Discovering Urbanism has a nice post up about early 20th century urban planner Charles Mulford Robinson and his planning textbook. It includes the following corrective to the notion that zoning originated as a way to separate polluting industry from places of residence and … [Read more...]
Urban[ism] Legend: Traffic Planning
Mathieu Helie at Emergent Urbanism posted a link to a interesting game created at the University of Minnesota. Mathieu explains it better than I can: The game begins in the Stalinian Central Bureau of Traffic Control, where a wrinkly old man pulls you out of your job at the mail room to come … [Read more...]
Yglesias Has My Head Spinning…
In his last two urbanism-related posts, Matthew Yglesias makes great points only to dissolve them in a vat of unrelated statements posed as conclusions. His logical inconsistency seems to invalidate his otherwise pretty good blogging on urbanism. A couple days ago, Matthew blogged about … [Read more...]
Do We Need “New Urbanism” To Fix “Unwalkable Sprawl”?
At Volokh, Ilya Somin discusses a recent piece in the American Prospect (also linked from here) that favors “New Urbanism” to prevent “unwalkable” sprawl. Somin favors “voting with your feet” as the preferred method of satisfying location preferences. Unfortunately, voting options have … [Read more...]
Urban[ism] Legend: The Myth of Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover is not a man I consider a "Legend" - quite the contrary. I use the words "Urbanism Legend" in the context of the series of posts intended to dispel popular myths as they relate to urbanism. Myths and fallacies about Herbert Hoover are abundant these days as the media discusses the … [Read more...]