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...]
Should governments nudge land assembly?
For a reading group, I recently read two papers about the costs and (in)efficiencies around land assembly. One advocated nudging small landowners into land assembly; the other is an implicit caution against doing so.Graduated Density ZoningAlthough he's mostly known for parking research and … [Read more...]
Introducing Szymon Pifczyk
New year, new ideas. Market Urbanism is proud to welcome Szymon Pifczyk as a new writer who will bring new perspectives to this ever-evolving blog. Szymon's Polish-language Twitter handle is @sheemawn, which is a pronunciation clue. His English-language account is the popular @YIMBYPoland.Here's … [Read more...]