Yesterday a bomb went off near where I work in Kabul. For security reasons, I need to be vague on the details of my relationship to events here; that is one reason I have not posted in the last two … Continue reading
Category Archives: planning
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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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
“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.” … Continue reading
Eleven years ago on this blog, I posted the idea of the gravitat. The concept was first envisioned by Herman Potočnik, a.k.a. Hermann Noordung (1928), and popularized by Werner von Braun in 1952. Here I discuss some refinements and wider … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading