Archive for December, 2007
New suburban dream
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007It’s the New Year, coming up and a time to think ahead, so here are my thoughts on Suburbs!
The suburbs, for the most part, are toast. They have three possible outcomes in the twenty-first century: as slums, salvage yards, or ruins.
- Howard Kunstler in the Freakonomics Quorum on Cities
I actually disagree with this statement. […]
“The Missing Class”
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007Review by guest blogger David Atkins
The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America by Princeton University sociologist Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen offers a glimpse into the lives of many urban, working Americans who live above the official poverty line, but are not quite middle class.
This book is based […]
Brilliant, diverse thoughts on cities
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007For those of you who haven’t read the Freakonomics Quorum on cities, I highly recommend it.
Five brilliant thinkers on metropolitan growth offer forecasts for the future (James Howard Kunstler, Edward Glaeser, Robert Bruegmann, Dolores Hayden and Alan Berube). Not all of their ideas are mutually compatible, but yet they also seem plausible or reasonable. […]
Density, family business and “mompreneurs”
Monday, December 17th, 2007In the dense neighborhoods and suburbs of Mexico City (such as Ciudad Neza or Coacalcos) I’ve often been intrigued by the variety of home based businesses that families — often the mother — operate. Some make paletas — ice creams and popsicles — to sell on the street or from a door […]
New styles of work and older urban designs
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007Penelope Trunk recently provided seven predictions on the future of work. Many will require changes to how people live in cities. Old style sprawl will not allow for new styles of working. Here I’ll address her first two predictions:
The end of gender disparity
Pay is equal for men and women until there are kids. […]
Moving away from the car-tropolis
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007How might cities change over the next 20 years?
Here’s one theory for North America generally: they will switch from evolving to facilitate, primarily, automotive travel to allowing citizens more time for leisure, which intriguingly will mean less automotive travel on a daily basis. This shift will also re-make who, socio-economically speaking, lives where within the […]
Car-troplois
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007The North American urban model is intertwined with the history of the automobile. Mass production reduced costs while rising living standards for the masses in the 1950s and 1960s further increased automobile affordability. At the same time, interstate highways–designed to allow quick movement of military and civilians in the event of war–allowed families to […]
Insights into San Francisco (and cities) from Allende’s “Daughter of Fortune”
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007With the holidays approaching, many readers of this blog might look to curl up by the fireplace with a novel instead of non-fiction books about the economy or planning theory. A good choice would be Isabel Allende’s book, Daughter of Fortune.
This spellbinding work of historical fiction details the experiences of a well educated young […]
Family-friendly cities: another angle
Monday, December 3rd, 2007The blogosphere has seen a recent surge in discussion about how to make a city family friendly. But in all the discussion about coffee houses and night life, the issue of the employment culture in a city hasn’t come up. This is what I’ll raise after summarizing the discussion thus far.
Joel Kotkin’s article, “The Rise […]
Want to live above a car dealership?
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007At the Northwest corner of Kingsway and 12th Avenue in Vancouver there is a 10 storey condo tower going in above a Honda dealership. My first reaction was huh?! Followed by “who would want to live there?”
But the more I thought about it, the more this seems like the cutting edge of a trend.
In a […]