An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Urban Culture, Space, Architecture, and Design
It was a pleasure to welcome Franco Minganti, Professor of American Literature at the University of Bologna, to my campus last week. Franco is the European-side Co-Director of a European Commission/United States Department of Education curriculum development grant awarded to […]
This is one of the big questions at issue in the Intercultural Urbanism blog posts archived under Water and the City. It’s also the question I brought to a half-day focus group about water supply and land use held in […]
I’m just back from the “Contours of The City Conference” in Bologna, organized by the University of Bologna’s Laboratorio di Ricerca Sulle Città. It was all good: terrific hosts, stimulating company, an elegant meeting venue, and great cuisine. The conference […]
I use the concept of cosmopolis in Leonie Sandercock’s sense, referring to a city that’s developed in ways sensitive to cultural diversity and its wider societal benefits (e.g., enhanced vitality and creativity). In a recent post I noted that the sessions […]
My title comes from that of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute’s 21st annual conference held last week at The University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law. “The Wilderness City: Nature, Culture, and Economy in the Next West” was framed […]
The Chronicle of Higher Education, to which I’m a long-time subscriber, channeled its inner urbanist last week with three city-related articles in the January 27 edition. Scott Carlson wrote about “America’s Health Threat: Poor Urban Design.” He featured the work […]
The new year has brought a new name to the New Urban Network website and the print newsletter New Urban News. They’re now called Better! Cities & Towns (hereafter, BCT). In announcing the changes editor Robert Steuteville noted that the […]
Denver is well-known nationally as a city dedicated to New Urbanist development. Several projects in the city—most notably Belmar, Stapleton, and Highlands Garden Village (HGV)—have received lots of prominent press and some significant praise. The Congress for the New Urbanism […]
Water is a key resource constraint in urban development, especially here in the West. Because of projected population growth—anticipated to double to 10 million people by 2050—Colorado is predicted to have a municipal and industrial water gap by at least […]
Kaid Benfield’s recent post about the BMW-Guggenheim Lab’s Urbanology game inspired me to play the game a few times myself. Then I asked my University of Denver Culture and The City class (which met for the first time last week) to […]
I’d like to revisit an issue raised in my recent summary of James Kunstler’s view of the urban future. This issue is the relative merits of competing urbanisms for addressing the contemporary challenges that confront city designers and planners. Kunstler […]
Which is a better city: Melbourne or Sydney? Geoffrey West’s and Luis Bettencourt’s provocative ideas (reported here and popularized here) got some play today in the Sydney Morning Herald. Reprising their argument that cities are 85% alike in the way […]