An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Urban Culture, Space, Architecture, and Design
As a small army of urbanists and pundits have pointed out, the recent violence in Ferguson and Baltimore reminds us that we haven’t moved very far toward eliminating the social conditions that produce race-based civic unrest. These events have prompted […]
My title reflects the theme of a breakout session at the fifth annual Rocky Mountain CitySummit held three weeks ago in Denver. The Summit is organized by the Downtown Denver Partnership and supported by a host of generous sponsors. It […]
A new scholarly paper from Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and University of Colorado, University of North Carolina, and University of New Mexico researchers argues that ancient and modern cities can be usefully analyzed from a comparative perspective. This promises contributions […]
In recent months there’s been a lot of talk about dead suburban malls and what we should do with them. Last September Ellen Dunham-Jones of Retrofitting Suburbia fame (co-authored with June Williamson) got the ball rolling in an interview with […]
It’s not the White City that would likely come to mind first, i.e., Daniel Burnham’s spectacular grouping of neoclassical buildings at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, made famous by Erik Larson’s book. Rather, it’s a white canvas tent […]
Witold Rybczynski started the latest go-round with a piece for the New York Times Magazine. Rybczynski laments the globalization of civic architecture by a handful of internationally known practitioners or “starchitects.” He asserts that architecture is a social art rather […]
I’m pleased to have been invited to write for the public interest urban planning website Planetizen. In keeping with the theme of Intercultural Urbanism my inaugural essay briefly describes the philosophical and practical commitments of an approach to urban planning […]
On New Year’s Eve 2013 the staff at Atlantic Cities (now City Lab) ran a story about “Urbanist Buzzwords to Rethink in 2014.” These buzzwords included popular favorites such as “placemaking”, “smart growth”, and even “gentrification.” Readers were urged to […]
My title identifies three powerful themes in contemporary urban thought that were highlighted at last fall’s biennial conference of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History held in Toronto, October 4-6, 2013. What follows is a lightly revised report on […]
My title is that of a session at the recent Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute’s (RMLUI) annual conference, in which I was privileged to participate. The session was among those in a featured conference track on “Conservation in Metropolitan Regions.” […]
For a reason articulated a bit more specifically below, the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday is an appropriate day for my first post of 2014. Our new Interdisciplinary Research Incubator for the Study of Social (In)equality (or, IRISE) at the […]
Jamaal Green thinks so. Playing off of a recent post by Kaid Benfield, he suggests that mainstream sustainability advocates must “move beyond a consumptive conception of cities that’s based on attracting a preferred social elite, whether they be footloose millennials […]