When a city wins the right to hold the Olympics, one of the oft cited advantages to the region is the catalytic effect upon the urban and transport projects of the host cities. However, with unparalleled access to documents and…
A century of auto-oriented culture and bad city planning has left most of the country with transit that is underfunded, ill maintained, and ill conceived. But as rising oil prices portend the end of the era of cheap energy, a remarkable…
“Call it ugly, call it beautiful, call it dysfunctional — but don’t call Los Angeles unplanned.” So begins a chapter titled “Challenging The Myth Of An Unplanned Los Angeles” in a new book out this week that you’ll definitely want…
There are an estimated 600,000,000 passenger cars in the world, and that number is increasing every day. So, too, is Earth’s supply of parking spaces. In some cities, parking lots cover more than one-third of the metropolitan footprint. It’s official:…
The Great American Dream of cruising down the parkway, zipping from here to there at any time has given way to a true nightmare that is destroying the environment, costing billions and deeply impacting our personal well-being. Jeffrey Tumlin’s new…
In our popular imagination, America is the land of wide-open spaces. But in reality, much of it is more densely populated than Europe. Two-thirds of the U.S. population lives on less than 20% of the privately owned land. With an…
Carleton K. Montgomery’s Regional Planning for a Sustainable America is the first book to represent the great variety of today’s effective regional planning programs, analyzing dozens of regional initiatives across North America. The American landscape is being transformed by poorly…
The High Line, a new park atop an elevated rail structure on Manhattan’s West Side, is among the most innovative urban reclamation projects in memory. The story of how it came to be is a remarkable one: two young citizens…
In the gorgeous new book titled Urban Transformation: Transit Oriented Development And The Sustainable City, authors Ronald A. Altoon and James C. Auld address the intersections of values, issues and priorities of public and private sector partners in creating positive civic…
In No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond, American architect Michael Maltzan traces the transformations that have taken place in the city of Los Angeles since the early 1990s. This is a beautifully produced book full…
