Because there are no market signals that could identify the best and highest use of street space, it is the role of urban planners to allocate the use of street space between different users and to design boundaries between them where needed.This article appeared originally in Caos … [Read more...]
In Praise of Randomness
Cities have always invited us to be constantly on the move. We move around to get to work, go shopping, meet friends, attend a concert, visit an art exhibition, and take advantage of all the many activities that a metropolis offers.This post appeared originally in Caos Planejado and is … [Read more...]
Resources for Reformers: Houston’s minimum lot sizes
Updated 1/11/24 to add 3 new papers, Wegmann, Baqai, and Conrad (2023), Dobbels & Tavakalov (2023), and Hamilton (2024). The original post was published 3/14/23.A concerted research effort has brought minimum lot sizes into focus as a key element in city zoning reform. Boise is looking at … [Read more...]
Rubbing Shoulders: Maybe
A study by Maxim Massenkoff and Nathan Wilmers argues that “low-price full-service restaurants,” like Olive Garden or the Cheesecake Factory, are the third places in which rich and poor are most likely to rub shoulders. Using location data, they found that these low-price chain restaurants had more … [Read more...]
Pedestrianized streets usually fail – and that’s OK
Urbanists love to celebrate, and replicate great urban spaces - and sometimes can't understand why governments don't:https://twitter.com/PEWilliams_/status/1697265425241752004But what's important to recall - especially for those of us under, uh, 41 - is that pedestrianized streets aren't a … [Read more...]
Urban Paths “World” Cup
Final update: the Milwaukee River Greenway is hereby declared the Best Urban Path in the United States! Sadly, it's among those that I haven't yet visited, a situation I'll need to rectify. I've invited a few Greenway partisans to write a guest post about what makes it the best urban path in America … [Read more...]
Book Review: The Making of Urban Japan
If you read one book about Japan this year, it should be the beautiful, new Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazan and his Studiolab colleagues, including Joe McReynolds. But if you read two books about Japan, as you should, the second one should be André Sorensen's … [Read more...]
California should indeed build new cities – but don’t let Nathan J. Robinson anywhere near them
Urbanist and YIMBY Twitter had a field day dunking on Nathan J. Robinson, whose essay in his publication Current Affairs (yesterday's tagline: "the one thing left that isn't disappointing") called for building new cities in California.The essay was a typical of the "anti-anti-NIMBY" genre: he … [Read more...]