Pietro

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

On Saturday, the 3rd-year urban design class visited the “M50” site and the surrounding area in Shanghai, which they will be redesigning for the semester. The instructors, Chris and Yu, invited me along! Before showing pictures, here are some maps to orient you. In the first map above, M50 is just below the center of

On Tuesday, after being in Suzhou for one full week, I accidentally found China. It began with an early-morning jog. I shot this image from the 15th floor of my apartment building in the middle of the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP). Looking west towards the Moon Bay development, you can see a not-yet open office

One of my colleagues lives on JinJi Lake Avenue, at the southwest corner of the lake. So on Saturday, I got to see this area which is opposite the Times Square/Ferris Wheel Paradise that I visited on Thursday. The tower that you can see below the tip of the lance of DonQuixote is the same

Sept 7: Yesterday, after posting the blog about my dorm, internet access to all non-foreign sites slowed down considerably and I could not update this site at all. It seems that the Great Firewall fluctuates in intensity. That is going to cause a problem when doing online research. During our orientation on Friday, the world

As mentioned before, my posts may be image-heavy and text-lite for a while; lots to do here. But one piece of overlap is the map above: I want to improve the maps available to faculty when they arrive at XJTLU. This map started as a screen-capture of a Baidu Map; hence the Chinese place-names. I

September 01, 2015 Hi all! I have decided to blog-in-haste about my experiences in China. Some of these postings may only be pictures, or very hasty impressions (with typos, alas), because I need to get up to speed with teaching here at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) in Suzhou. The first thing I need to say

This May I was hired by Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University to teach in Suzhou, China for three years. I am thrilled for three reasons: first, because the Lecturer position within the British system is the equivalent of an Assistant Professor in the U.S. system. Second, I am aiming to use this “scheduled shake-up” of my life