planning

Taking responsibility for Trump

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

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Back to Berkeley

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

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The Will to House!

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

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Reading the infrastructure

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

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Urbanism and Geopolitics

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

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Shanghai (??): first visit

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

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