Pietro

These days I work in China, so in winter I only have 4 weeks to spend with my family in California. These four weeks are overshadowed by the transition to a disastrous new American presidency. The first policies being imposed don’t even seem to favor conservatives; they seem primarily intended to aggrieve Americans who believe […]

Liberals never collectively said ‘I told you so’ about the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We should have. As it turns out, that story is not over. The post-occupancy analysis made it very clear that Hussein was bluffing, And that George W. Bush’s pressure to find some excuse to invade Iraq caused intelligence analysts to

Many Republicans have tried to disassociate themselves from the election of Donald Trump. This is consistent with a Republican pattern of seeking to avoid taking responsibility, perhaps best encapsulated in Mitt Romney’s book title No Apologies. Trump has promoted an atmosphere of racism and intolerance that the Republican party finds embarrassing. This may have also

“California is – and must always be – a refuge of justice and opportunity for people of all walks, talks, ages and aspirations – regardless of how you look, where you live, what language you speak, or who you love.” Joint Statement from California Legislative Leaders on Result of Presidential Election, November 9, 2016 In

Eleven years ago on this blog, I posted the idea of the gravitat. The concept was first envisioned by Herman Poto?nik, a.k.a. Hermann Noordung (1928), and popularized by Werner von Braun in 1952. Here I discuss some refinements and wider uses of the gravitat. Using this system, humans could live under Earth-normal gravity conditions on

Since I research the intersection of urbanization and globalization, I have studied a fair bit about migration and refugees. With that perspective, our family situation is pretty good. But it is still strange to be away from my family for most of the year, teaching at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. It is a

Over the last few weeks I have begun to rethink my ideals for the design of cities at the block level of scale. Yesterday my colleague Raffaele Pernice reviewed the history of modern urban design with our class. His slides reminded me that the mid-19th-century industrial city is often seen as the starting-point, the problem.

One of the maddening obstacles to making cities both interesting and affordable in the United States is the opposition to real urban housing. Back in 1920 there was good reason to fear density: we had just figured out how to deal with contagious diseases. And apartments at that time were still cramped, dim, and poorly-ventilated. In

Last week I assigned an unusual text for my students: the city of Suzhou itself. In this post I am going to show some examples of what I mean by reading the city as a text. My first examples are quite literal. I began looking at the lids that cover infrastructure immediately after I arrived in

Today I have just completed my first month in China. Time permitting I will get back to blog-postings that include lots of photos. But for today, I wanted to reflect on issues of urban politics and what that means for my work in China. 1. Addressing some paranoias about China When I was preparing to