Present City, Future City: India

In the Old City, Ahmedabad. In February and March we spent a month visiting seven cities across India, from south to north, from west to east. Our time there was completely exceptional: invaluable, surprising, educational, revealing, depressing, infuriating, eye-opening and more. I continue to reflect on those days, and it has taken me until now …

A Little and a Lot

The largest city on earth - Tokyo. Image by Altus. I have often found myself reflecting here on matters of scale - of blocks and streets, of cities and neighborhoods. Recently I have found myself thinking about the relationship between the really, really big, and the fairly tiny. Let me explain. We lead our daily …

Some Thoughts for the New Plumber-In-Chief

Announced just over a week ago, your new infrastructure fund is now gone, Mr. President. It’s all been spent already, several times over, by politicians, constructors, lobbyists, trade associations. Get your staff to try googling “Obama infrastructure plan,” and up pop hundreds of thousands of web sites, and nearly every newspaper, magazine, financial analyst, and …

Skeptics and Scarcities: Next Urbanism 101

I have been reading my usual array of favored websites, and have run into an interesting string of comments in the last couple of days. It seems that Michael Pollan's piece in the NYT Magazine, which I recommended in the last post, has ignited a furor in some quarters. Pollan is being accused of "eco-armageddonizing." Notwithstanding …