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Geography. Environment. Urbanism. And other stuff.
Browsing All Posts filed under »cities«
Research blogging: Depopulation can be murder
Lately I’ve been doing some research for a book proposal on abandoned places and the processes behind massive and rapid depopulation. It’s a topic I’ve been interested in for a while – in fact, I would have written my Ph.D. dissertation on the subject if I had thought of it earlier (I came up with […]
Making cities comparable
September 5, 2012
When the definition of “city” – at least on an administrative level – varies so widely from country to country, how can you draw any meaningful comparisons on topics like density, health, and wealth between cities in different parts of the world? A new paper posted on LSE Cities takes a stab at at addressing […]
Remember when Tampa was America’s Next Great City? Yeah, me neither.
August 30, 2012
Tampa is a city with an inferiority complex. This has been clear to me since I first moved there, when I was just twelve years old. For one thing, for as long as I’ve lived in the Tampa Bay area, there’s been something going on with Orlando. Those Mickey Mouse punks have always thought they’re […]
The absence of place from Chinese cities
August 22, 2012
Foreign Policy just published an issue completely devoted to urban issues. Two in particular – both about China – caught my attention, mostly for the way in which they take different approaches to telling essentially the same story about place and its role in Chinese cities. Apparently, placemaking was not a significant priority for 20th-century […]
Places that never were
August 1, 2012
Some places never get a chance to be. That, I fear, will be the case with the new Angolan city of Kilamba, a pre-planned, Chinese-built city designed for half a million residents, but which currently has only 220 occupied apartments. I’m not sure I know of another example of a city of this size being […]
Is small the solution to San Francisco’s housing crunch?
July 24, 2012
San Francisco has long had a well-deserved reputation as a tight market for rental properties. Apartments there are, on average, smaller and much more expensive than in other American cities, a reflection of the high demand for living space on a peninsula that was built out long ago. It also has a reputation as a […]
What should be downtown?
May 29, 2012
In a lot of cities, you can get a good sense of the character and strength of the urban economy simply by paying attention to what is downtown. For example, a lot of art galleries and funky shops suggests that an urban revitalization is probably well underway, and that it’s more or less an organic […]
Problem streets, part two: the cul de sac
May 10, 2012
“Cul de sac” is just a fancy way to say “dead end.” As everyone knows, it’s the preferred street type in modern suburbia: a dead-end street with an asphalt “bulb” at the end of it, around which sit maybe half-a-dozen basically identical houses. The cul de sac discourages connectivity between streets and neighborhoods (which is […]
Raising an urban generation
May 8, 2012
“Mommy, I’m scared.” These words came out of the mouth of a nine-year-old girl, in the middle of a group of adults doing a neighborhood cleanup on a sunny Saturday morning. The neighborhood in question was my own St. Pete neighborhood, and the child who uttered those words was the visiting niece of a friend […]
The irony of Detroit
April 23, 2012
I hate cars. I’m all too aware that I’m in the minority with that sentiment, and that generally speaking, people love their cars. And I know cars have a major role to play in America’s transportation system. I can accept that. Still – speaking only for myself here – if I could go the rest […]
Your host
October 1, 2012
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