An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Urban Culture, Space, Architecture, and Design
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 […]
The New York Times just ran a story about the steps that Honolulu is taking to crack down on the homeless in an effort to shore up its tourism industry. Homelessness is up 32% in Honolulu over the past 5 […]
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.” […]
One of the joys of teaching and researching urban issues in London—at least for some of us—is experiencing pub culture and partaking of its liquid assets. Thus it was with great concern that I read an article in yesterday’s New […]
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 […]
The demolition in question is the campus of the former University of Colorado Health Sciences Center at 9th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard in Denver. We’ve been chronicling this development, and the struggle between developers and citizens over what it should […]
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 […]
Understanding the preferred tastes and desires of the particular demographic that contemporary urban placemakers most seek to attract—the Millennials—is one of the planning profession’s major preoccupations. One of the advantages of teaching urban studies to a college audience is that […]
Denver’s Civic Center Park is one of America’s best preserved legacies of the early 20th century City Beautiful movement. Opened in 1919, the park has had its ups and downs over the years. In the last decade over $15 million […]
In preparing a report for my university’s Office of Internationalization on last winter’s trip to research Post-Olympics regeneration in London (some preliminary notes are here), I came across this review in The Guardian by Oliver Wainwright. His piece is pretty critical […]
The Denver Post has the story of a typical after-hours Saturday night in Lower Downtown Denver, and it’s not pretty. In 2010 “LoDo” was identified by the American Planning Association as one of America’s Great Places in the “Neighborhood” category. […]