urban sprawl

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Lectures on Urban Economics by Jan K. Brueckner

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, company town, congestion charging, Edward Glaeser, invisible hand, market clearing, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Economic Geography, profit maximization, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, urban sprawl

HT321.B78 2011 330.09173'2—dc22 2011006524 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 ix Why Cities Exist 1 Introduction 1 Scale Economies 2 Agglomeration Economies 5 Transport Costs and Firm Location 10 The Interaction of Scale Economies and Transportation Costs in the Formation of Cities 16 Retail Agglomeration and the Economics of Shopping Centers 18 Summary 20 Analyzing Urban Spatial Structure Introduction 23 Basic Assumptions 25 Commuting Cost 26 Consumer Analysis 27 Analysis of Housing Production 33 Population Density 39 Intercity Predictions 42 Summary 50 23 Modifications of the Urban Model 51 Introduction 51 A City with Two Income Groups 51 Commuting by Freeway 56 Adding Employment Outside the CBD 57 Durable Housing Capital 61 Cities in Developing Countries 65 Summary 68 vi 4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 7 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 8 8.1 8.2 8.3 Contents Urban Sprawl and Land-Use Controls 69 Introduction 69 Empirical Evidence on the Spatial Sizes of Cities 70 Market Failures and Urban Sprawl 73 Behavioral Impacts of Urban Sprawl 80 Using Land-Use Controls to Attack Urban Sprawl 80 Other Types of Land-Use Controls 84 Summary 89 Freeway Congestion Introduction 91 Congestion Costs 92 91 The Demand for Freeway Use 95 Traffic Allocations: Equilibrium and Social Optimum Congestion Tolls 104 Choice of Freeway Capacity 110 Application to Airport Congestion 112 Summary 114 99 Housing Demand and Tenure Choice 115 Introduction 115 Housing Demand: The Traditional and Hedonic Approaches The User Costs of Housing 119 Tenure Choice 124 Down-Payment Requirements, Tenure Choice, and Mortgage Default 130 Property Abuse and Tenure Choice 133 Summary 136 Housing Policies Introduction 137 Rent Control 137 137 Housing-Subsidy Programs 145 Homelessness and Policies to Correct It Summary 157 Local Public Goods and Services Introduction 159 153 159 The Socially Optimal Level of a Public Good 161 Majority Voting and Voting with One’s Feet 163 116 Contents vii 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 Public-Good Congestion and Jurisdiction Sizes 174 Capitalization and Property-Value Maximization 179 Tax and Welfare Competition 183 Summary 185 9 Pollution 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 Introduction 187 Pollution from a Single Factory and Governmental Remedies 188 Bargaining as a Path to the Social Optimum: The Coase Theorem 196 Cap-and-Trade Systems 200 Evidence on Air Pollution and Property Values 204 Summary 205 10 Crime 187 207 Introduction 207 The Economic Theory of Crime 208 Additional Aspects of the Theory 215 How to Divide a Police Force Between Rich and Poor Neighborhoods 221 10.5 Summary 229 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 11 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 Urban Quality-of-Life Measurement Introduction 231 Theory: The Roback Model 233 Measuring Urban Quality of Life 241 Additional Issues 244 Summary 245 Exercises 247 References 273 Index 281 231 Preface This book offers a rigorous but nontechnical treatment of major topics in urban economics.

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The results show no impact of such a move, indicating that suburban living has no causal effect on obesity. Thus, these two studies suggest that both of the alleged behavioral impacts of urban sprawl are absent in the data. 4.5 Using Land-Use Controls to Attack Urban Sprawl 4.5.1 Urban growth boundaries and sprawl The discussion in section 4.3 showed that two price-based instruments can be used to address urban sprawl. The first of these instruments 10. In their empirical work on the determinants of sprawl, Burchfield et al. (2006) equate sprawl with scattered development. Urban Sprawl and Land-Use Controls 81 was a development tax, designed to correct the market failure associated with open-space amenities.

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Instead of residing in a city that contains both rich and poor households, with public services shared between the two groups, high-income households may have an incentive to form their own homogeneous communities at the edge of the city, reinforcing the tendency toward spatial expansion already spurred by the above fundamental forces (see Nechyba and Walsh 2004). Public-sector issues are discussed in detail in chapter 8. Urban Sprawl and Land-Use Controls 4.3 73 Market Failures and Urban Sprawl 4.3.1 The market failure related to open-space amenities Urban economists have identified several market failures that may be relevant to urban sprawl. The first involves the amenity benefits generated by open space, which are lost when this space is consumed by urban development. Suppose, in particular, that each acre of agricultural land yields b dollars of open-space benefits to society, over and above the benefits resulting from the crops it produces.

Road to ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it by Dom Nozzi

Boeing 747, business climate, car-free, congestion pricing, Donald Shoup, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, New Urbanism, Parkinson's law, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, skinny streets, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

For decades, traffic engineers who design roadways actually referred to walkers in the Highway Capacity Manual as ‘traffic interruptions.’ ”7 Whatever a community makes its main form of transportation profoundly shapes the way it will use its land, not the other way around. Weak land use plans and feeble regulations did not create urban sprawl, for example; pouring money into roads and cars did. And whatever transportation our community chooses—for most of us, cars—also shapes our quality of life. As we have learned over the years, single-mindedly choosing car transportation has dispersed and isolated us and degraded our communities’ quality of life, environment, and financial health.

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All such remedies force us to drive more often; encourage more people and businesses to move from in-town locations; make walking, bicycling, and riding the bus more diffi-cult; degrade our quality of life with noise, hazards, and air pollution; cost us a lot of money; and move our once unique communities closer to becoming Anywhere, USA. As it has become more clear that auto-oriented urban sprawl puts our quality of life in a downward spiral, people-friendly solutions have started to present themselves again. We could develop vacant, underused in-town property instead of more remote “greenfield” suburbs. We could design more modest, low-speed streets and build fewer enormous parking lots.

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With a car at our command, we don’t have to trudge to the subway, huddle in the rain or snow waiting for a bus, or simmer in the summer sun sweating our way six miles to work on a bicycle. So we’re in agreement. We’re keeping our Expeditions, F-150s, Blazers, and Explorers. It is irrational for us not to. WHAT DO THOSE SUVs COST US? Of course, we pay a price for all that convenience. Air, water, and noise pollution. Injury and death. Environmental degradation. Loss of land. Urban sprawl. Our time. Lots and lots of money. Social and emotional isolation. Clean Air Air pollution is an easy place to start, because nearly everyone agrees that cars cause it—or a large portion of it. Beyond that agreement, the arguments get murky. Just to make clear the correlation between driving cars and air pollution . . .

Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future by John Whitelegg

active transport: walking or cycling, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, carbon tax, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, Donald Shoup, energy transition, eurozone crisis, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), megacity, meta-analysis, negative emissions, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-industrial society, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, Right to Buy, smart cities, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban sprawl

The Atlanta system burdens city and regional administrations with unaffordable costs and a widening gap between revenue and expenditure. It also causes enormous problems for ordinary families. The impact on ordinary families of similar situations in Australian cities has been very well documented by Dodson and Sipe (2008). The consequences of misguided policies in Australian cities to encourage urban sprawl, longer distances for most journey purposes and high levels of dependency on private cars has been to give ordinary families huge problems of managing budgets, coping with rising petrol prices and in extremis being unable to get to work and joining the ranks of the urban poor. Urban poverty in this case is directly linked to all those policies that have combined to produce sprawl, car dependency, and lack of destinations that are easily accessible and grossly inadequate public transport.

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E-mobility is currently promoted as part of the maximum mobility objective and to provide a green smokescreen to reinforce the mobility paradigm by suggesting that mobility can be zero carbon/lower carbon and non-polluting. If e-mobility can be delivered to the extent that it can replace the vast majority of petrol/diesel car trips in Europe (and this has not yet been demonstrated) the result will be hugely expensive and many more roads with all their damaging effects will be funded and built. Urban sprawl will continue to consume valuable land that could be used for food production and land also provides valuable landscape, ecological and biodiversity services that are destroyed when new roads occupy that space. Distances travelled will increase and as distances increase so walking and cycling decline.

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E-mobility offers some relief from damaging exhaust emissions and their health impacts but sits very uneasily in the wider context of polices and measures that could increase accessibility reduce congestion and reduce deaths and injuries in the road traffic environment. It cannot deliver on these wider societal objectives and should be more correctly seen as a device to maintain the growth of mobility and in particular the growth of private motorised transport and urban sprawl. It is not located within a coherent sustainable transport policy context characterised by the demotion of mobility as a societal objective. This demotion is now recognised as an overdue policy change by a United Nations report (United Nations, 2013) and this same report recommends its replacement by comprehensive accessibility objectives: “Achieving transport affordability objectives require actions that support non-motorised transport; reduce the financial costs of transport services; and increase transportation affordability through improved land-use accessibility.”

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, benefit corporation, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, congestion pricing, David Brooks, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, food miles, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, parking minimums, peak oil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, skinny streets, smart cities, starchitect, Stewart Brand, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

This is why Chris Leinberger believes that “all the fancy economic development strategies, such as developing a biomedical cluster, an aerospace cluster, or whatever the current economic development ‘flavor of the month’ might be, do not hold a candle to the power of a great walkable urban place.”37 WHY JOHNNY CAN’T WALK The obesity bomb; Clearing the air; American car-nage; Tense and lonely The best day for being a city planner in America was July 9, 2004. That’s when Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank, and Richard Jackson published their book Urban Sprawl and Public Health. Until that day, the main arguments for building walkable cities were principally aesthetic and social. More significantly, almost nobody but the planners was making them. But it turns out that while we were shouting into the wilderness about the frustrations, anomie, and sheer waste of suburban sprawl, a small platoon of physicians was quietly doing something much more useful: they were documenting how our built environment was killing us.

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.● And sometimes when children do walk to school, their parents are visited by the police: a Salt Lake City newspaper carried in December 2010 the story of Noah Talbot, of South Jordan, who was picked up by the police on the way to school and his mother issued a citation for child neglect.5 Jackson and his coauthors note how “children are increasingly medicated for inattentiveness or hyperactivity, even as many are losing their opportunities for exercise at school or in the neighborhood. There are third-grade classes in which as many as a third of the boys are on Ritalin or similar medications.”6 To summarize the findings of Urban Sprawl and Public Health—which are echoed by a growing number of epidemiologists nationwide—the inactivity-inducing convenience, often violent speed, and toxic exhaust of our cars have contributed mightily to the circumstance that “for the first time in history, the current generation of youth will live shorter lives than their parents.”7 THE OBESITY BOMB In any meaningful discussion about American health (and health care), obesity has to be front and center.■ In the mid-1970s, only about one in ten Americans was obese, which put us where much of Europe is right now.

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The study concluded that an hour spent driving triples your risk of heart attack in the hours that follow.32 A Belgian paper published in The Lancet found that traffic exposure accounts for more heart attacks worldwide than any other activity, even including physical exertion.33 Closer to home, a Miami study found that “after driving their cars across the city for forty-five minutes, university students had higher blood pressure, higher heart rates, and lower frustration tolerance.” This study is mentioned in Urban Sprawl and Public Health, where Dr. Jackson and his colleagues go on at length about driving stress, road rage, and their significant impacts on our national well-being. And the numbers are not insignificant—but let’s step back from health for a minute and talk about happiness. Is motoring around and around really how we want to be spending so much of our time?

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

That same year, a report written by Russ Lopez of the Boston University School of Publish Heath for Fannie Mae entitled Thirty Years of Urban Sprawl in Metropolitan America warned of the dangers of our settlement patterns. “Urban sprawl is emerging as a major environmental, health and social issue,” Lopez wrote. California’s Inland Empire, the twenty-seven-thousand-square-mile zone between Los Angeles and the Riverside/San Bernardino hubs, emerged as a poster child of urban sprawl, a massive region where two-thirds of residents lived more than ten miles from a central business district, and the packed highways and clogged arterial roads had led to almost unbearable rates of congestion and pollution.

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By 2000, metropolitan areas covered: U.S. Census Bureau. That same year: Russ Lopez, Thirty Years of Urban Sprawl in Metropolitan America: 1970–2000: A Report to the Fannie Mae Foundation. a massive region where two-thirds of residents: Scott Gold and Massie Ritsch, “Swallowed by Urban Sprawl,” Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2002. In 2002 a report: Reid Ewing, Rolf Pendall, and Don Chen, Measuring Sprawl and Its Impact, Smart Growth America, 2002. “There is no ‘there’ there”: Gold and Ritsch, “Swallowed by Urban Sprawl.” The historian Lewis Mumford: Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, pp. 237, 244; Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (Mariner Books, 1970).

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California’s Inland Empire, the twenty-seven-thousand-square-mile zone between Los Angeles and the Riverside/San Bernardino hubs, emerged as a poster child of urban sprawl, a massive region where two-thirds of residents lived more than ten miles from a central business district, and the packed highways and clogged arterial roads had led to almost unbearable rates of congestion and pollution. In 2002 a report by the nonprofit agency Smart Growth America rated it the nation’s worst example of urban sprawl. “There is no ‘there’ there,” said one of the authors of the report. • • • Experts, academics, and other influential thinkers have been expressing concern about our modern pattern of suburban development since the first Levittown. Intellectuals worried early on about the postwar suburbs’ uniformity and lack of character. The historian Lewis Mumford denounced Levittown almost as soon as it went up, saying it was using “new-fashioned methods to create old-fashioned mistakes.”

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Nonetheless, try as Latouche might, the inspiration behind this eco-totalitarian movement is, for innumerable activists, undeniably Marxism. In his essay “Urban Sprawl, Climate Change, Oil Depletion, and Eco-Marxism,” University of Miami political science professor George A. Gonzalez writes: “The U.S. urban zones are the most sprawled in the world…. Urban sprawl can only be fully comprehended within the political economy framework developed by Karl Marx. Marx’s concepts of value and rent are indispensable to understanding the profligate use of fossil fuels—vis-à-vis urban sprawl—that has significantly contributed to oil depletion and to the recent global warming trend.

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For Latouche, they are utterly void of ecological considerations and adopt capitalist goals related to production and growth. Yet, for both the enemy is economic progress. “Urban sprawl,” writes Gonzalez, “was deployed in the United States during the 1930s as a means of reviving U.S. capitalism from the Great Depression. The sprawling of urban zones greatly increased the need for automobiles and other consumer durables. This use of urban sprawl to increase economic demand is consistent with Marx’s argument that demand within capitalism is malleable and is geared toward increasing the consumption of goods and services produced through social labor.

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The quartet continues: “Degrowth has evolved into an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action. For instance, anti-car and anti-advertising activists, cyclists and pedestrian rights campaigners, partisans of organic agriculture, critics of urban sprawl, and promoters of solar energy and local currencies have started seeing degrowth as an appropriate common representative frame for their world view.”9 The social movement envisioned by these utopians would drag America into a regressive, impoverished society with widespread economic and social dislocation—that is, a pre-industrialized environment where progress comes to an end, for that is the goal.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

“Census reveals African-American children are leaving large U.S. cities as their young parents head for better life in suburbs,” Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2009903/African-American-children-leaving-biggest-U-S-cities-young-parents-head-suburbs.html. DUNN, Ross E. (1987). The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century, Berkeley: University of California Press. DURKIN, Martin. (2012, January 13). “Three Cheers for Urban Sprawl,” New Geography, http://www.newgeography.com/content/002622-three-cheers-urban-sprawl. DYOS, H.J. et al. (1968). “Agenda for Urban Historians,” The Study of Urban History, New York: St. Martin’s Press. EARNSHAW, Martin. (2008). “Communities on the Couch,” The Future of Community, London: Pluto Press. EASTERBROOK, Gregg. (1999, March 15).

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“Jews and the Jewish Birthrate,” aish.com, http://www.aish.com/jw/s/48899452.html. WHYTE, William H. (1965). “The Anti-City,” Metropolis: Values in Conflict, Belmont: Wadsworth. WILFORD, John Noble. (2000, December 19). “In Maya Ruins, Scholars See Evidence of Urban Sprawl,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/19/science/in-maya-ruins-scholars-see-evidence-of-urban-sprawl.html. WILKINSON, Francis. (2014, April 9). “Why are Liberal Cities Bad for Blacks?” Bloomberg View, http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-09/why-are-liberal-cities-bad-for-blacks. WILKINSON, Thomas O. (1965). The Urbanization of Japanese Labor: 1868–1955, Amherst: The University of Massachussetts Press.

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If people move to the periphery, it is not because they are deluded or persuaded by advertising but because they perceive that is where their quality of life is higher.178 As we’ve seen, suburban and urban expansion are nothing new. New archeological evidence points to the earliest cities being formed by combining several discrete small communities; even the ancient Maya had what researchers described as “urban sprawl,” complete with large houses and even an archaic version of strip malls. For his part, Aristotle spoke about cities as the union of “several villages.” Suburbs and small communities are not new phenomena but instead are woven into the history of urban life.179 Rather than demonizing and belittling the suburbanite, urbanists would be far better off taking a more human-city approach and focusing on how to improve life not only in the city cores but also in extensive areas that have developed around them.

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America by Jon C. Teaford

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, conceptual framework, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, East Village, edge city, estate planning, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Potemkin village, rent control, restrictive zoning, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, young professional

Smith, and Jerry Adler, “Sprawling, Sprawling … ,” Newsweek, 19 July 1999, pp. 23, 25. 23. Donald C. Williams, Urban Sprawl: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2000), p. 1. 24. James Howard Kunstler, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition (New York: Free Press, 2001), p. 43. 25. Phillip J. Langman, “American Gridlock,” U.S. News & World Report, 28 May 2001, p. 19. 26. Kunstler, City in Mind, p. 41. 27. Michelle Cottle, “House Arrest,” New Republic, 6 August 2001, p. 18. 28. John G. Mitchell, “Urban Sprawl,” National Geographic, July 2001, p. 71. 29. Lacayo, “Brawl over Sprawl,” p. 45; Randal O’Toole, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths (Brandon, Ore.: Thoreau Institute, 2001), p. 32; Bruce Katz, “The Permanent Campaign,” Urban Land, May 2003, p. 49. 30.

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As early as 1952, the upscale Saint Louis suburb of Clayton attracted the corporate headquarters of the Brown Shoe Company, and in 1962 a thirteen-story office building opened, followed a year later by a sixteen-story office tower. In 1966 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch observed that the suburb’s burgeoning skyline “no longer blended into the county’s amorphous urban sprawl, but now appeared more like a little Tulsa or perhaps an Omaha, than just another incorporated outskirt of St. Louis.”34 FIGURE 3.3 Office buildings at Northland Shopping Center, Southfield, Michigan, 1965. (Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University) On the West Coast, Stanford University was nurturing the suburbanization of business.

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Through the creation of entire new communities, Americans could supposedly correct the urban flaws resulting from the unplanned development of the past. Rather than segregating rich and poor, white and black, the new cities could embrace social and racial heterogeneity and provide housing and jobs for a diverse and hopefully harmonious population. Moreover, through enlightened planning, the new communities could halt mindless urban sprawl and offer something better than the prevailing pattern of unrelated housing subdivisions and garish commercial strips along traffic-jammed highways. They could also provide adequate open space and recreational facilities and preserve rather than bulldoze the natural beauty of the countryside. And they could foster imaginative modern architecture rather than create additional rows of the banal boxes with neo-colonial trim so typical of suburbia.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet by Roger Scruton

An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, corporate social responsibility, demand response, Easter island, edge city, endowment effect, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, food miles, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, hobby farmer, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, market friction, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

I am thinking of the following: the initiative of American nature lovers, acting upon the United States Congress, to create national parks, the action by Iceland to protect the breeding ground of the Atlantic cod, the legislation that freed Ireland from polythene bags, the clean energy initiatives in Sweden and Norway, the Swiss planning laws that have enabled local communities to retain control over their environments and to manage those environments as a shared possession, the British ‘Green Belt’ policies that brought an end to urban sprawl, the initiatives of lobster-catchers in Maine and cod-fishers in Norway to establish self-regulating fisheries with local people in charge. These are small-scale achievements, but they are real, and could, if replicated more widely, change the face of the earth for the better.26 Moreover, they are successful because they appeal to a natural motive – the shared love of a shared place.

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The Campaign for the Preservation (subsequently Protection) of Rural England (CPRE) was launched in 1925, and now has branches all over the country, doing what they can in the cause of the ‘beauty, tranquillity and diversity of the countryside’. The efforts of the CPRE were boosted by the historian G. M. Trevelyan, whose book Must England’s Beauty Perish?, published in 1926, awoke the reading public to the threats posed by urban sprawl and the growing network of roads. Trevelyan’s warning was amplified in 1928, when the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, founder of the model town of Port Merion in Wales, published England and the Octopus, describing the danger for both town and country of ribbon development – sprawl along the roads between conurbations.

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City councils and central government connived with the developers to desecrate our ancient cities, and to place the working class on Bauhaus perches above the ruins. Coventry, one of the greatest medieval cities in Europe, lost 30 per cent of its timber-frame houses as a result of bombing; the city council got rid of the rest; and the example is by no means untypical.330 Unfortunately, although the Town and Country Planning Act of 1946 put a stop to urban sprawl, it could not save the cities themselves, many of which were in the hands of corrupt councillors and vengeful oikophobes. The destruction of agriculture had begun in the wake of the First World War, with the introduction of large-scale mechanized farming and the purchase of the bankrupt holdings by absentee investors.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

These data on population growth, urban expansion and density, and those in the paragraph below on streets are from Shlomo Angel, Atlas of Urban Expansion, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2016. 24. UN-Habitat, Streets as Tools for Urban Transformation in Slums. 25. Mark Swilling, “The Curse of Urban Sprawl: How Cities Grow and Why This Has to Change,” The Guardian, July 12, 2016, www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/12/urban-sprawl-how-cities-grow-change-sustainability-urban-age. 26. Letty Reimerink, “Medellín Made Urban Escalators Famous, but Have They Had Any Impact?,” Citiscope, July 24, 2014, http://citiscope.org/story/2014/medellin-made-urban-escalators-famous-have-they-had-any-impact; “City of the Year,” Wall Street Journal Magazine, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/ad/cityoftheyear. 27.

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Data on Ferguson are from Elizabeth Kneebone, “Ferguson, MO, Emblematic of Growing Suburban Poverty,” Brookings Institution, August 15, 2014, www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2014/08/15-ferguson-suburban-poverty; James Russell, “Ferguson and Failing Suburbs,” Jamessrussell.net, August 17, 2015, http://jamessrussell.net/ferguson-and-failing-suburbs; Stephen Bronars, “Half of Ferguson’s Young African-American Men Are Missing,” Forbes, March 18, 2015, www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2015/03/18/half-of-fergusons-young-african-american-men-are-missing. 13. On the connection between commuting time and economic mobility, see Reid Ewing, Shima Hamidi, James B. Grace, and Yehua Dennis Wei, “Does Urban Sprawl Hold Down Upward Mobility?” Landscape and Urban Planning 148 (April 2016): 80–88. 14. On the delivery of local services to the suburbs, see Arthur Nelson as cited in Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2013). For the UCLA study, by the California Center for Sustainable Communities, see Laura Bliss, “L.A.’s New ‘Energy Atlas’ Maps: Who Sucks the Most Off the Grid,” CityLab, October 6, 2015, www.citylab.com/housing/2015/10/las-new-energy-atlas-maps-who-sucks-the-most-off-the-grid/409135.

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Of course, nearly 20 percent of Bell’s population lives below the poverty line, which means that its residents use less air conditioning, fewer computers, and so on. On the overall cost of sprawl to the US economy, see Todd Litman, “Analysis of Public Policies That Unintentionally Encourage and Subsidize Urban Sprawl,” London School of Economics and Political Science, for the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate for the New Climate Economy, 2015, http://static.newclimateeconomy.report/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/public-policies-encourage-sprawl-nce-report.pdf. 15. Christopher Ingraham, “The Astonishing Human Potential Wasted on Commutes,” Washington Post, February 25, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/25/how-much-of-your-life-youre-wasting-on-your-commute. 16.

The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories by Ilan Pappé

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, low skilled workers, Mount Scopus, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yom Kippur War

However, sheep did graze this hillside when the rural Palestinian village of Sheikh al-Badr was situated there. A few of its houses still remain, next to the American hotels frequented by Israeli members of the Knesset who do not live in Jerusalem. The village was gradually swallowed by the city, becoming part of the urban sprawl until it was ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces in 1948. It was a famous part of the city, as it overlooked one of Jerusalem’s best-known landmarks: the Valley of the Cross. Tradition has it that the tree that provided the wood for Christ’s cross stood there and this is why it is said that on that spot Greek Orthodox monks built an impressive monastery, still there today, albeit surrounded by new Jewish neighbourhoods and ring roads.

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On this land, the government developed the shechunot (‘neighbourhoods’), a euphemism used to describe the new Jewish colonies built in East Jerusalem so as to single them out as part of the new post-1967 Israel. It was through land robbery by the state, endorsed by all the Zionist parties, that these urban sprawls were created. A very thorough and exhaustive study by the Palestinian researcher Khalil Tafakji enables us to follow this process very carefully, facilitated by the helpful way he lists the names and locations of the new settlements. This act of recording is extremely important, as only a handful of Israeli Jews within the consensus, including the Zionist peace camp, would recognize these neighbourhoods as settlements.

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So while the ink was still drying on the Oslo Accord, Greater Jerusalem was reinvented as an area consisting of 600 square kilometres, which included 15 per cent of the West Bank (just one block of it, Maleh Edumain, is nearly 1 per cent of the West Bank).7 Satellite settlements in areas adjacent to this new Greater Jerusalem were built with the future intention of serving as land bridges between Greater Jerusalem and the rest of the Israeli colonies in the West Bank. This expansion soon covered the ancient hills of North and East Jerusalem with a new urban sprawl of modern housing dressed up here and there with orientalist façades that resembled the very houses demolished to build these new ‘neighbourhoods’. As Eyal Weizman elucidated so clearly in his book Hollow Land, the 1968 master plan for Jerusalem was committed to both a colonial and oriental heritage dating back to the British urban planning of 1917 – with two huge differences.

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

The baby boom generation is past its child-bearing years, and the proportion of the population in their thirties, the cohort traditionally most likely to buy a house, is at an historic low. There is a corollary to suburban living: utter car dependency. Although the suburbs we’ve built for ourselves depend on cars to function, there is another, more subtle symbiosis at work between urban sprawl and the automobile. My time on the road in Los Angeles and Phoenix was probably the longest uninterrupted stretch I’ve spent in a car in the last decade, and it made me grateful I don’t own one. By pitting you against everybody else on the road, driving turns travel itself into competition. After two weeks, I was looking for any excuse to ditch my ride, go for a walk in a park, eavesdrop on a conversation, or just feel the sidewalk under my feet.

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When the French state began building the RER in the early 1960s, it had specific development goals in mind: the Schéma directeur, a kind of regional master plan inspired by Stockholm’s suburban mass transit system, called for new RER stations to concentrate the population in such satellite towns as Cergy-Pontoise, Évry, and Marne-ta-Vallée. Paris’s suburbs would continue to grow, but it would be railways, not highways, that would carry the bulk of the traffic, serving suburban university campuses, airports, and the new high-rise employment centers at La Défense. The goal of the RER was to limit urban sprawl, and it worked. While suburbanization continued—in the six years after line A opened in 1969, central Paris would lose 400,000 inhabitants—the city did not bleed into its hinterland anything like a London or a Moscow. The RER prevented low-density development by encouraging suburbanites, very few of whom use cars to commute, to live within walking distance of stations.

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Public transport didn’t structure central Paris the way it did New York or Los Angeles, which grew and evolved simultaneously with their subway and streetcar lines: with infinite care, the métro was shoehorned into an ancient walking city. It was the extensive RER system, which allows suburbanites to live within walking distance of train stations, that played the greatest role in transforming modern Paris, permitting the creation of dense suburbs while limiting urban sprawl. The métro, in contrast, preserved the integrity of the historic city. Why build expressways, after all, when an efficient, reliable, and comfortable alternative could always be found underfoot? And that is how the métro saved Paris. Le Supermétro My instructions were clear: be on the platform at République station, no later than 11:40 a.m.

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

For a comparison of average energy use and carbon dioxide emissions per person in cities versus suburbs, see Alex Williams, “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You,” New York Times, February 10, 2008. 15 See Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank, and Richard Jackson, Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004). 16 See Reid Ewing et al., “Relationship Between Urban Sprawl and Physical Activity, Obesity, and Morbidity,” American Journal of Health Promotion 18:1 (2003); and Lawrence Frank, Martin Andresen, and Tom Schmidt, “Obesity Relationships with Community Design, Physical Activity, and Time Spent in Cars,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 27:2 (2004). 17 A useful summary of the wide range of research in this area is presented in “Understanding the Relationship between Public Health and the Built Environment,” prepared by Design, Community & Environment; Dr.

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Lawrence Frank, a chaired professor at the University of British Columbia, to document the wide range of health effects related to living in sprawl, including the impact of car emissions, accident rates, social isolation, and, in particular, reduced levels of physical activity. Recognizing the growing correlation between urban sprawl and human sprawl, they note that the percentage of obese Americans more than doubled, from 15% to 31%, between 1980 and 2000. What also more than doubled over the same time period is the number of hours the average American spent driving.15 While there are plenty of other factors at work, subsequent research has shown that people who live in walkable neighborhoods have lower body mass indices on average than those in nonwalkable neighborhoods.16 The collective implication of these studies is that suburbs are not quite the healthy places in which to raise a family as has commonly been perceived, nor are cities as unhealthy.17 The implications for policy makers to change development regulations are profound—as are the obstacles.

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Casto Corporation dorm buildings Dover, Kohl & Partners Dover, Victor Downtown Kendall/Dadeland (Miami-Dade County, Florida) demographic analysis morphological analysis overview regulating urbanizing framework Downtown Park Forest DPZ. see Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company drivable sub-urban development Duany, Andres Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ) Echelon Mall eclecticism Economic Research Associates edge cities. see also Downtown Kendall/ Dadeland evolution of future of Greenway Plaza infilling Addison Circle Century City Coliseum Central Area effectiveness of Hacienda Business Park Legacy Town Center Nassau Hub Perimeter Place Tukwila Urban Center Tysons Corner redirecting retrofits across multiple parcels Edge City: Life on the New Frontier book edgeless cities Edible Estates book EDS. see Electronic Data Systems elastic tissues Belmar defined Downtown Kendall/Dadeland Mashpee Commons University Town Center Electronic Data Systems (EDS) Elkus Manfredi Architects Ellis, John Emhart Manufacturing Research Building (Bloomfield, Connecticut) Enaje, Stephanie energy efficiency Englewood (Colorado) Cinderella City Mall CityCenter Englewood environment, effect of urban sprawl on Envision Utah exclusionary zoning face-to-face contact Fairfax (Virginia) farming Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal book FasTrax system favored quarter Federal Realty Investment Trust festival centers figure-field diagrams Belmar Downtown Kendall/Dadeland Mashpee Commons University Town Center financing first suburbs Fishman, Robert flats Florida. see also Downtown Kendall/ Dadeland Apollo Beach Charlotte Harbor Koger Center Miami-Dade County Mizner Park Picayune Strand Temple Terrace Winter Park Village Florida, Richard Foley’s department stores foreclosure foreign-born population form-based codes fractured governance franchises Frank, Lawrence, Dr.

The Locavore's Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers, Hiroko Shimizu

air freight, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, food miles, Food sovereignty, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, intermodal, invention of agriculture, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, megacity, moral hazard, mortgage debt, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, refrigerator car, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl

Increased farming biodiversity is not only desirable from an ecological perspective, but also more aesthetically pleasing than factory farming. In addition, large-scale producers are much less likely to be held accountable by distant consumers for the damage they cause to ecosystems. Promoting local food production also encourages land conservation for agricultural purposes and is an indirect way to fight urban sprawl. Unlike imported food, locally grown produce is often sold without packaging that then gets thrown away. • Security: Populations fed by local producers can always count on them in times of crisis such as during wars or with sudden price hikes on imported food items. By their very nature, international food markets only cater to the highest bidders and are not concerned with the fate of marginal populations.

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Of course, additional trade-offs are also present in the case of more modest urban agriculture proposals, from rooftop gardening to the raising of backyard chickens, whose small size and consequent inability to generate economies of scale (try using a tractor on top of a high-rise building or obtaining large-scale discounts on the costs of inputs when farming small backyards) will always confine the practice to the realm of hobby gardeners, or, at best, high-margin luxury producers—either way, a result that is a far cry from the affordable and abundant food promised by locavores. “Protecting” the farmland that surrounds large cities from “urban sprawl” (in other words, preventing residential, industrial, and commercial development on agricultural land) through strict zoning is equally problematic. While restricting development might suit the sensibilities of people who already own residential property in thriving cities, it also unavoidably drives up housing prices, thus affecting disproportionately people of more modest means and newcomers (to say nothing of farmers’ children who would like to get out of this line of work and cash in on the family property).

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(Of course, many individuals argue that markets are too short-sighted and that future agricultural land shortages are looming. Yet, because in advanced economies we now produce much more food on the same piece of land than in the not so distant past, much more agricultural land is currently reverting to a “wild” state than swallowed by “urban sprawl.”47) Also, nothing prevents environmentalists from purchasing land they deem worth preserving rather than using political power to declare private farmland part of a “greenbelt” and prevent its owner from selling it to developers or converting it to other uses. Prohibiting the redevelopment of agricultural land might appeal to the sensibilities of well-off or already established urbanites and environmentalists, but it is a selfish policy that ignores the economic benefits of urbanization and the needs of people of lesser means.48 Time and Trade-offs Finally, another point lost on many locavores is that the one thing that money cannot buy is more time, thus making it the scarcest commodity of all.

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Parkinson's law, post-war consensus, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, technological determinism, Thomas Malthus, urban sprawl

First, terrorism is a small threat compared with hunger, disease, or climate change.57 Three thousand died in the United States that day; 25,000 die every day in the world from contaminated water alone. Each year, 20 million children are mentally impaired by malnourishment.58 Each year, an area of farmland greater than Scotland is lost to erosion and urban sprawl, much of it in Asia. Second, terrorism cannot be stopped by addressing symptoms and not the cause. Violence is bred by injustice, poverty, inequality, and other violence. This lesson was learnt very painfully in the first half of the twentieth century, at a cost of some 80 million lives.59 Of course, a full belly and a fair hearing won’t stop a fanatic; but they can greatly reduce the number who become fanatics.

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See Alan Kolata, Tiwanaku and Its Hinterland: Archaeology and Paleoecology of an Andean Civilization (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1996); and Charles Stanish, Ancient Titicaca: The Evolution of Complex Society in Southern Peru and Northern Bolivia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). 37. Twenty-one square kilometres. 38. The white man was not the first to be guilty of urban sprawl in great rectangles across American landscapes. 39. Webster, for example, (Ancient Maya, p. 297) notes maize pollen at Copan by 2000 B.C. Other Maya cities also began as farming villages at about this time. 40. The early text is on a stela at El Portón, in highland Guatemala. See Sharer, Ancient Maya, p. 79. 41.

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., 15, 135n20 rulers, see kings Rwanda, 185n64 salt and soil, 77, 78, 79, 157n62 science and religion, collision, 10 science fiction, 122 scientific method, 10 Scientific Romance, A (Wright), 83, 122–23 scientific romances, 119, 122 Second World War, 121 Secret Agent, The (Conrad), 120, 147n47 sheep, 43, 159n9 slavery, 71, 114 smallpox, 50, 112, 116–17 social Darwinism, 130, 186n70 social safety net, 127, 183n60 social structure, see classes; “pyramids,” social Solon, 87 Soros, George, 129 Soviet Union, 6 Spanish conquests, 86, 112, 174n15 spearthrower, 141n13 speech, 13, 135n19 Steinbeck, John, 124 stock market, 129 Sumerians, 33, 65–79, 82, 83 blind to impact on nature, 87 city-states, 68, 70 classes, 71 collapse, 83, 158n3 emergence of civilization, 33, 149n1 environment, 67–68, 74–75 floods, 74–77, 156n55, 156n56 human sacrifice, 71–73 irrigation and effects, 68, 77–79 kingship, 70–73 population, 68, 154n38, 157n2 priesthood, 69, 70 slaves, 71 temple prostitution, 70, 154n35 trade, 69 writing, 69–70 ziggurats, 69, 153n32 Tainter, Joseph, 92, 107, 125, 128, 181n52 Tattersall, Ian, 38 technological determinism, 47 technology concerns, 122, 182n54 early machinery, 177n28 as measure of progress, 4–7, 46–47 temple prostitution, 70, 154n35 Teotihuacan, 95, 163n38 terrorism, 49, 126, 147n47 Tikal, 95–96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105, 165n49, 167n55 Time Machine, The (Wells), 120, 121 Tiwanaku, 94, 163n36, 166n52 towns and villages, Neolithic, 48–49 trade China with Rome, 104, 170n75 Sumerians, 69 trees, 59–60, 86, 185n67 United Nations, 128 United States deficits, 186n69 hostility to conservation, 124, 129–30, 181n49 imperial expansion, 86, 159n7 Ur, 78, 79, 154n38 urban sprawl, 126 Uruk, 67, 70, 79 Ussher, Archbishop, 11 Utnapishtim, 75–77, 156n56 Utopia (More), 115–16 Victorian ideal of progress, 3 violence, 33–34, 71–73, 126, 139n5, 140n6 Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee), 71, 122 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 117, 178n35 warfare, 33–34, 48–49, 121 early humans, 24–26 twentieth century, 121, 180n43 waste, 125 weapons, 5–6, 29, 31, 121, 179n41 of early humans, 36, 141n13 Webster, David, 100, 101, 145n39 Wells, H.

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

Thousands of people walk daily along La Rambla, the leafy three-quarter-mile pedestrian mall in Barcelona, Spain. Image: nito/Shutterstock Walkable cities Why redesigning our communities around walking is the best medicine By Jeff Speck The best day to be a city planner in America was July 9, 2004 — the day Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank, and Richard Jackson published their book Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities. Until that day, the main arguments for building more pedestrian-friendly cities were principally aesthetic and social. More significant, almost nobody but city planners was making these arguments. But it turns out that while we were shouting into the wilderness about the frustrations, anomie, and sheer waste of suburban sprawl, a small platoon of physicians was quietly doing something much more useful: documenting how our built environment is killing us.

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Mills, Active Transportation for America (Washington, D.C.: Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, 2008), 44. 5. E. Kolbert, “XXXL: Why Are We So Fat?,” The New Yorker, July 20, 2009. 6. Ibid. 7. Peirce. 8. C.B. Leinberger, The Option of Urbanism (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2009), 76. 9. H. Frumkin, L. Frank, and R. Jackson, Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004), 100. 10. E. Noonan, “A Matter of Size,” Boston Globe, March 7, 2010. 11. C. Lutz and A. Lutz-Fernandez, Carjacked (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2010), 172. 12. “State of the Air 2011 City Rankings,” American Lung Association. 13.

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

He said, “Sometime ago I came across a comment that the major problems confronting the world today could be summarized as bombs, babies, and bulldozers: Nuclear bombs and missiles which might destroy civilization overnight; an excess of babies which could frustrate efforts at economic development; and bulldozers which are well on their way to leveling the world’s countryside to make way for a chaotic urban sprawl.”70 In the months before Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination, Congress and the bureaucracy moved ahead of the president and set the stage for what historian Donald Critchlow identifies as a quiet “policy revolution.”71 In August, Sen. Joseph Clark (D-Pa.) gave the first major speech in Congress identifying a need for population reduction at home and abroad.72 Clark and Sen.

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Judith Morgan, a ZPG vice-president, said that the organization’s chapters were “local salespersons for land use planning, discussions of growth control mechanisms” and the “advocacy of [local] population ‘caps.’ ”187 Given the dramatic increase in the suburban population in midcentury America, ZPG hardly 194 chapter 6 could have avoided the issue of urban sprawl. Yet the emphasis on local growth fostered a certain amount of middle-class, “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) sentiment, which diluted the critique of aggregate population and consumption increases. Reservations about population growth helped shape American environmental policies well before the takeoff of the zero population growth movement of the late 1960s.

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Advocates of a national growth policy acknowledged the increase of the aggregate population, but their primary concern was the deleterious effects of distribution, for example, the “sprawl” created by the expanding megalopolises concentrated along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.47 Hence, many proposals for a national growth strategy included efforts to subsidize population relocation.48 The campaign for growth policy united liberals, who opposed the ecological effects of urban sprawl, and conservatives, who focused on the social ills of the city. Within Nixon’s inner circle, Moynihan personified the connections between growing fears of an urban crisis, the drive for growth policy, and the broader population debate. He chaired the White House’s informal Urban Affairs Council, and it was no coincidence that he subsequently spearheaded the population issue.

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

In the case of the suburbanisation of cities, these costs can be seen today in the prevalence of low-density, car-dependent neighbourhoods and the resulting road congestion, economic and environmental costs (Litman, 2015) – although these impacts are far less pronounced in Britain than in many other developed economies, thanks to the much greater constraints on urban sprawl imposed after the Second World War. The combined effect of increased social housing and new private development meant that by the time war broke out again in 1939, an additional 4 million homes had been built since 1918 (Marshall, 1969). This period marked the beginning of the next major shift in land’s economic significance as it became the site of what has come to be regarded as a near-universally entitled consumption good: the family home.

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In 2011, Altoona became the first place to shift the entire burden of property tax onto the land, in effect making it a full land value tax area. Evidence suggests that the split-rate taxation system in Pennsylvania has positively stimulated the construction and refurbishment of residential and commercial buildings, and resulted in a more efficient use of land (Cohen and Coughlin, 2005) and helped to curb urban sprawl (Banzhaf and Lavery, 2010). 7.4 Financial reform We laid out in Chapter 5 the central role of the financial system and its pro-cyclical interaction with land as the key challenge facing modern economies today. In modern economies, not least the UK, new loans collateralised against property have become the main source of the money supply and house prices have become intimately linked to consumption demand and economic growth via the collateral channel.

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London: Bank of England. http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/financialstability/Pages/fpc/fsdiscussionpapers/080416.aspx. Bank of England. 2016d. ‘Three Centuries of Macroeconomic Data’. London: Bank of England. http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Pages/onebank/threecenturies.aspx. Banzhaf, H. Spencer, and Nathan Lavery. 2010. ‘Can the Land Tax Help Curb Urban Sprawl? Evidence from Growth Patterns in Pennsylvania’. Journal of Urban Economics 67 (2): 169–179. Barker, Kate. 2004. Review of Housing Supply: Delivering Stability: Securing Our Future Housing Needs: Final Report: Recommendations. London: HMSO. Barlow, S. M. 1940. Report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

The ISS really was no more than a space research station; in contrast this solar shield and transport terminal would protect Earth from trillions of dollars of devastating losses, perhaps save millions of lives, provide a constant supply of clean energy from space, and serve as a cost-efficient way station to the rest of the Solar System. And this is just one idea about how humans could reshape the structure of the inner Solar System to make it more usable and to help protect Earth from future catastrophic losses [1]. 5. Urban Sprawl is Bad, Urban Density is Good, Super Urbanization is Bad Again. For many years urban planners have sung a consistent song about the dangers, wastes and polluting effects of urban sprawl . The thought is that urban density can make for more efficient transportation, water, handling of sewage, communications, power, and storm sewer systems, and that housing, offices, schools, medical facilities, and shopping areas are also more effective and cost efficient.

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Here is the ten point program that could make the world safer, more prosperous, and help us suffer much less strife and warfare.1.Seek agreement on global population control and associated incentives as a means to stop eating our planet alive. 2.Move to adopt sustainability as a strategy to create and achieve new wealth. 3.Encourage the world’s space agencies to prioritize planetary protection programs—including space shields to preserve modern infrastructure. 4.Recognize that urban sprawl is bad, urban density is good, while super urbanization and mega cities are bad again. 5.Refocus efforts on developing systems to address priority needs related to climate change, potable water and U. N. goals for sustainable development. 6.Deploy new space- and ground-based infrastructure for education and health care. 7.Recognize the unrealized potential of the coming singularity and the new abundance. 8.Adopt a new system of laws and regulation for the twenty-first century for global cooperation in space and on the planet. 9.Redefine and re-incentivize exploitation of “the global commons” for the twenty-first century based on sustainability and equitable sharing. 10.Recognize that humanity is at the turning point.

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S. regulatory actions Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (SMPAG) Space navigation Space R&D programs Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act of 2015 common heritage of mankind global commons legal enforcement outer space change policing regulatory system Sentinel infrared telescope space colonies traffic control and management Space Resource Utilization Space Swiss Systems (S3) Space tourism Space transportation ICAO radiation danger radio frequencies, allocation of SARPS traffic management and control Space-based navigation Space-based war-fighting systems SpaceHab Spaceplane system aerospace organizations safe and non-polluting development Space Ship 2 Space Swiss Systems (S3) SpaceShipOne and space tourism SpaceShipOne SpaceShipTwo Star wars Stratobus Stratolaunch Subspace/protospace Super automation Super urbanization Syncom 2 T TASI SeeTime Assignment Speech Interpolation (TASI) TDRS SeeTracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system Ten Point Program the global commons global population control humanity laws and regulation mega-structures and intellectual infrastructure planetary protection programs singularity space- and ground-based infrastructure sustainability urban sprawl Time and human technological progress Time Assignment Speech Interpolation (TASI) Tiny 40-kg Early Bird satellite Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system Transformational Satellite System (TSat) Transitional satellite (TSAT) Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space Tripartite space governance unit TSat SeeTransformational Satellite System (TSat) TSAT SeeTransitional satellite (TSAT) U U.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

Over those same years, large Wall Street landlords like Invitation Homes (owned by the Blackstone Group) and American Homes 4 Rent were also being sued for a litany of complaints very similar to those in Celebration: negligent maintenance for mold, water penetration, infestations, and defective fixtures. There were also complaints of fee stacking—such as charging a late fee for nonpayment of a previous late fee—and of price gouging on rents. Stories about chronic neglect by corporate owners emerged across the entire housing landscape, from rural towns to urban sprawl. In its marketing materials, Invitation Homes boasted of providing a “worry free” living environment with “peace of mind” through “exceptional resident services,” including “24/7 emergency maintenance.”20 Yet tenants experienced service more akin to that of a slumlord, with long waits for major repairs, and most other maintenance jobs left in their own hands.

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The environmental groups noted that the county already had a large surplus of approved but unbuilt residential units—62,356 of them—inside the UGB, in addition to 25.8 million square feet of similarly unused commercial space, so there was no demonstrated need to extend the boundary for further development.8 The agency agreed, ruling that Osceola’s proposed amendment was unnecessary, environmentally damaging, and likely to promote urban sprawl since it would remove any incentive to develop the “vacant underutilized land” that lay within the UGB.9 In other words, if the Northeast District plan were approved, Osceola would be pulling the rug out from under the smart growth commitments it had made only three years previously.10 Luckily for the developers, the agency’s days were numbered.

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See Gabrielle Russon, “Disney World Is Suing over Its Property Taxes—Again,” Orlando Sentinel, June 12, 2020, https://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/tourism/os-bz-disney-rick-singh-20200612-6hiunjd6hjef3c7si5imzjte3e-story.html. It also takes advantage of the state’s agricultural tax break to preserve rural land from urban sprawl. Often called the “two-cow tax break” because of the low bar it sets for landowners seeking an exception, the law is widely abused by developers and corporations like Disney. Jason Garcia, “Ca$h Cow: Tavistock, Disney and Others Save Millions from Tax Break Meant to Help Farmers,” Orlando Sentinel, February 19, 2021, https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-prem-ne-florida-farming-property-tax-break-20210217-xngxwwbc4vakjlrbcq5sfltdcq-htmlstory.html. 15.  

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The innovation precipitated a powerful new economic engine: as people moved from inner cities to detached homes in increasingly distant sprawl, they bought furniture and appliances to fill those homes, and cars to move between increasingly disconnected destinations. The market economist’s case for suburban sprawl goes like this: if you can judge what makes people happy by observing how they spend their money, then the fact that so many people have purchased detached homes in urban sprawl is proof that it leads to happiness. As writers such as Robert Bruegmann and Joel Kotkin have argued, sprawl fulfills American’s preferences for privacy, mobility, and detachment from the problems of high-density environments. By this way of thinking, sprawl reflects every individual’s natural-born right to maximize utility.

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Mableton, you may recall, showed up in Lawrence Frank’s urban-health studies as one of those towns that is so unwalkable that people get fatter just living there. The unincorporated community fifteen miles west of downtown Atlanta is the kind of place where you could drive for days and never quite feel that you had arrived anywhere. Tendrils of asphalt braid and curl through the semi-urban sprawl northeast of Atlanta’s Perimeter beltway, with cul-de-sacs and strip malls and business parks evenly scattered over the rolling terrain. If you circled the dying mall down on Veterans Memorial Highway—cruelly misnamed the Village at Mableton—or doubled back and headed up to the big-box power centers that cling to the East-West Connector, you would find yourself increasingly disoriented, and you would not have found anything you’d call a downtown—certainly not the view from the post office parking lot.

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T. Cacioppo, D. S. Lauderdale, and C. Ober, “Loneliness Is Associated with Sleep Fragmentation in a Communal Society,” SLEEP 2011; 34(11):1519–26. live longer: Putnam, Robert D., Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2000); Frumkin, Howard, Lawrence Frank, and Richard Jackson, Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building Healthy Communities (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004); Seeman, T. E., “Social Ties and Health: The Benefits of Social Integration,” Annals of Epidemiology, 1996: 442–51; Hirdes, J. P., and W. F. Forbes, “The Importance of Social Relationships, Socioeconomic Status, and Health Practices with Respect to Mortality Among Healthy Ontario Males,” Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 1992: 175–82; Veenstra, Gerry, “Social Capital and Health (Plus Wealth, Income Inequality and Regional Health Governance),” Social Science and Medicine, 2002: 849–68; Berkman, Lisa F., “The Role of Social Relations in Health Promotion,” Psychosomatic Medicine, 1995: 245–54.

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

autonomous vehicles, call centre, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, garden city movement, gentrification, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, manufacturing employment, market design, market fragmentation, megacity, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, rent control, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

From NIMBY, “not in my backyard,” an expression used by pressure groups to prevent development of any type, including indispensable public services like hospital and homeless shelters. 19. Jan K. Brueckner and David A. Fansler, “The Economics of Urban Sprawl: Theory and Evidence on the Spatial Sizes of Cities,” Review of Economics and Statistics 65, no. 3 (1983): 479–482, quote on 479. 20. Jan K. Brueckner, “Urban Sprawl: Lessons from Urban Economics,” Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 2001. 21. Edward L. Glaeser and Matthew E. Kahn, “Sprawl and Urban Growth,” NBER Working Paper 9733, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, May 2003. 22.

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Urban economists have therefore identified the many factors that could distort urban land markets, such as the inability to price road congestion; the subsidies given to infrastructure and fuel prices; the abusive use of eminent domain underpricing rural land; and finally, the land use regulations that force households and firms to use more land than they need—minimum lot sizes, maximum densities, and maximum FARs. These distortions could indeed result in an excessive expansion of urban land, and removing them would make expanding cities more efficient and the area they occupy closer to an economic optimum. For instance, Brueckner, in a paper titled “Urban Sprawl: Lessons from Urban Economics,”20 provides an analysis of the possible causes for land market distortions and identifies practical remedies. For each possible cause of distortion, a theoretical model can be built that calculates the impact of the distortion on urban land consumption. For instance, in a country that subsidizes gasoline, an economist can calculate the impact of the subsidy on a city built-up area and the reduction in urbanized land that would result from removing the subsidy.

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See Standard urban model Sprawl (Bruegmann), 116 Staff agencies, 369–370 Staley, Samuel, 176 Standard of living, 290–291 Standard urban model, 388n18 minimum standards in, 288–289 for spatial distribution, 101, 113–114, 115–118, 117f, 129–130, 140–141 Sprawl (Bruegmann), 116 theory of, 95–97, 98f–99f, 99, 335–336 “Urban Sprawl: Lessons from Urban Economics” (Brueckner), 336 Stanford University, 351 Stockholm, 385n22 St. Petersburg (Russia), 373, 384n6 Strategic Community Investment Report Data, 353 Streetscapes, 331–332 Street space. See Road networks Subdivisions, 230–231, 230f Subletting, 266–267, 282–283 Subsidies in affordability, 303–304 demand side subsidies, 260–263, 262f, 267–268, 286, 304 economics of, 100–101 for infrastructure, 290–292, 291f poverty and, 273 supply side subsidies, 264–269, 265f, 285–286 Subways.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Government Printing Office, Congressional Research Service, A Chronology of Housing Legislation and Selected Executive Actions, 1892-2003, Mar. 2004, www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CPRT-108HPRT92629/html/CPRT-108HPRT92629.htm. 176 the McMansions of their day: Hayden, “Building the American Way,” 276. 176 disproportionately to middle-class enclaves: U.S. General Accounting Office, Resources, Community, and Economic Development Division, House of Representatives, Community Development: The Extent of Federal Influence on “Urban Sprawl” Is Unclear, Apr. 30, 1999, GAO/RCED-99-87 Research on “Urban Sprawl,” www.gao.gov/archive/1999/rc99087.pdf. 176 overwhelmingly single-family houses: U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Census 2000, Data Profile for the United States, Summary File 3, generated using American FactFinder. 177 half of the jobs . . . away from the city center: Kneebone, “Job Sprawl.” 177 inverse connection between density and car usage: Glaeser and Kahn, “Sprawl,” 2499-2500. 177 Accord... a hundred square feet on its own: According to Honda’s Web site, a 2010 Honda Accord has a length of 194.1 inches and a width of 72.7 inches, for an area of 98 square feet: http://automobiles.honda.com/accordsedan/specifications.aspx?

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Cities built around the car, like much of Los Angeles and Phoenix and Houston, have enormous, gently curving roads and often lack sidewalks. In those places, shops and pedestrians retreat from the streets into malls. While older cities usually have an obvious center, dictated by an erstwhile port or a rail station, car cities do not. They just stretch toward the horizon in undifferentiated urban sprawl. Places like Atlanta and Houston remind us that there are places that lie between hyperdense Hong Kong and rural Saskatchewan. Living and working in car-oriented Silicon Valley offers plenty of proximity, at least to people in the computer industry. The threat that these places pose to traditional cities reflects the fact that they offer some of the old advantages of urban access along with plenty of land and the ability to drive everywhere.

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group=dimensions. 178 typical parking space: Parking regulations in Massachusetts, for instance, require parking spaces to measure at least 9 feet by 18 feet, or 162 square feet: www.mass.gov/Cago/docs/Municipal/sb_parking.rtf. 178 structured parking, which can cost more than $50,000: Marshall and Emblidge, Beneath the Metropolis, 181. 178 average gas tax in France: Glaeser and Kahn, “Sprawl,” 2499-2500. 178 Comparing seventy cities ... 40 percent: Glaeser and Kahn, “Sprawl.” 178 Today, 84 percent of passenger transport: European Road Federation, European Road Statistics 2009, table 6.3: “Inland Transport Modal Split by Country in EU-27,” p. 43. 178 In Italy ... 5 and 5.66: European Automobile Manufacturing Association, Automobile Industry Pocket Guide, “Trends in Motorisation,” p. 4, www.acea.be/images/uploads/files/20090529_motorisation.pdf. 178 there are 7.76 cars for every 10 Americans: Ibid. 178 European Environment Agency . . . “low density residential areas”: European Environment Agency, Urban Sprawl in Europe, fig. 2, p. 12. 179 in the United States . . . forty-eight minutes: Glaeser and Kahn, “Sprawl,” 2499-2500. 179 That time cost . . . for buses and subways: Glaeser et al., “Why Do the Poor Live in Cities?” 12. 180 The Woodlands: General history of The Woodlands from Galatas and Barlow, The Woodlands. 180 on twenty-eight thousand sylvan acres: The Woodlands. http://www.thewoodlands.com/masterplan.htm. 180 over ninety-two thousand people live in The Woodlands: The Woodlands Development Company.

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard

A Pattern Language, call centre, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, congestion pricing, Frank Gehry, global village, Google Earth, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, job satisfaction, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, peak oil, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Snow Crash, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban sprawl

When we suggested that those so affected could simply walk to one another’s houses, the traffic engineer curtly replied, “They won’t.” The issue was closed. We put our house on the market a few days later. In the second half of the twentieth century, urban sprawl accelerated dramatically. The urban area of Atlanta ballooned to over 160 kilometers when measured from north to south. Detroit’s population actually decreased by 2 percent while its land area increased by 45 percent. And urban sprawl is not just a North American phenomenon. Brussels, Frankfurt, Munich, and Zurich all showed decreases in population density in the late twentieth century. Even Copenhagen, a showpiece city for improving pedestrian access to the urban core, had a net decrease in population density.23 There is much to enjoy in the suburbs.

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A fascinating repository of facts and figures related to the worldwide problem of urban sprawl can be found in the book by Jeffrey Kenworthy and Felix Laube entitled An International Sourcebook of Automobile Dependence in Cities, 1960-1990 (University Press of Colorado: Boulder, CO, 1999). 24. One of the most widely cited (and frightening) views of the coming changes related to peak oil is Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (Grove Press: New York, 2006). 25. The history of Portland’s experiences with Oregon’s groundbreaking 1973 restrictions on urban sprawl, as well as many other positive examples of smart growth approaches, can be found in the book by F.

Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States by Bernadette Hanlon

big-box store, classic study, company town, correlation coefficient, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, feminist movement, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, McMansion, New Urbanism, Silicon Valley, statistical model, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white flight, working-age population, zero-sum game

Growth Management Policies addressing decline among inner-ring suburbs often exist in the framework of “smart growth.” Definitions of smart growth are varied (e.g., see Smart Growth America 2003; Vermont Forum on Sprawl 2003), but, in their broadest sense, smart-growth policies are characterized as strategies aimed at curbing another ill-defined concept, urban sprawl. In the process of combating sprawl, smart-growth policies encourage the redevelopment of inner-ring core areas and the development of infill sites closer to the urban core area rather on the outer fringe (Downs 2001). The 2002 American Planning Association report, Planning for Smart Growth: 2002 State of the States, surveys various growth-management policies across different states.

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Participation in American politics: The dynamics of agenda-building. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Cobb, Roger W., Jennie-Keith Ross, and Marc Howard Ross. 1976. Agenda building as a comparative political process. American Political Science Review 70 (1): 126–138. Cohen, James. 2001. Maryland’s smart growth: Using incentives to combat sprawl. In Urban sprawl: Causes, consequences and policy responses. Ed. Gregory Squires, 293–324. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. Cooke, Thomas, and Sarah Marchant. 2006. The changing intrametropolitan location of high poverty neighbourhoods in the US, 1990–2000. Urban Studies 43 (11): 1971–1989. Cooper, Donald R., and Pamela S.

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The new urban frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist city. London: Routledge. Smith, Neil, Patrick Caris, and Elvin Wyly. 2001. The “Camden syndrome” and the menace of suburban decline: Residential disinvestment and its discontents in Camden County, New Jersey. Urban Affairs Review 36 (4): 497–531. Squires, Gregory D. 2002. Urban sprawl: Causes, consequences, and policy responses. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. Stahura, John M. 1979. Suburban status evolution/persistence: A structural model. American Sociological Review 44 (6): 937–947. Sternlieb, George, and Robert W. Lake. 1975. Aging suburbs and black homeownership.

Amazing Train Journeys by Lonely Planet

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, country house hotel, Donner party, high-speed rail, megacity, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, trade route, urban sprawl

Keep an eye out as the train crosses the famous Ham Rong bridge soon after at Thanh Hoa – perhaps the most strategically important bridge on the railway during the Vietnam War, it was the target of hundreds of unsuccessful American bombing raids, % contested by countless dogfights in the skies above. The Reunification Express saves the best for last on its final approach to Hanoi – slicing straight through the chaotic urban sprawl of Asia’s most beautiful capital. Rather alarmingly, the tracks form an ad hoc market-turned-pedestrian-walkway when trains aren’t running, with stalls and houses standing inches from the rails. Connecting Vietnam’s greatest attractions makes the railway immensely popular with tourists – reliably whisking visitors from the serene pools of Hue to the hectic markets of Ho Chi Minh City, and from the lazy resorts of Nha Trang to the scooter- clogged Old Town of Hanoi.

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A Japan Rail Pass offers unlimited travel on this train, meaning you can spend all day, or a couple of days, hopping on and off and exploring this route. Combine it with hiking part of the signposted Nakasendō Way to really get a feel for how travellers and traders plied this route in bygone times. ❶ RIDING THE RAILS Winding. You feel the mountains rise up next to you almost immediately as the train works its way out of Nagoya’s urban sprawl. Tin-topped houses and telephone poles give way to a river, which you follow most of your way to Matsumoto. The river changes course and names several times but feels a constant companion. You have to relax, because this railway is not your stereotypical Japanese bullet train. Make no mistake: you’ll depart and arrive on time, exactly – Japanese efficiency extends to the farthest reaches of its railway network – but that is not the point here.

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The train doesn’t run from mid-December to mid-January. OB RIGHT: The Outback, as seen from the comfortable carriages of the Ghan. © MATT MUNRO | LONELY PLANET Explore the northern city of Darwin and nearby Kakadu National Park. Darwin South Coast Line AUSTRALIA Escape Sydney’s urban sprawl with this relaxing day-ride on the prettiest of commuter lines. Pass remnants of Gondwanaland rainforest and verdant bush resplendent with fascinating birdlife, delve through tunnels and deep ravines fringing one of the world’s oldest national parks and be dazzled by stunning ocean vistas of rocky headlands, beckoning golden beaches and migrating whales.

Straight Flush: The True Story of Six College Friends Who Dealt Their Way to a Billion-Dollar Online Poker Empire--And How It All Came Crashing Down... by Ben Mezrich

asset allocation, call centre, urban sprawl

By the third and fourth book they’d visited, the seediness was reaching almost cartoonish proportions. Around 4 P.M., at the last stop before they were to break for dinner—and start a night of festivities that Eric had assured them would rival anything they had experienced at the fraternity house—they pulled up in front of a warehouse at the edge of an urban sprawl of similar rectangular buildings. Eric parked the car and led them through the front door, past a security desk, then a pair of secretaries who didn’t even bother looking up from the Spanish newspapers they were reading. Then through an unmarked wooden door and into a corner office. And there, the man behind the desk was right out of a Martin Scorsese movie.

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It was midafternoon, just like the last time he’d arrived in San José, but the roads seemed even more congested, traffic going in every direction. As before, he was amazed at how alive the place felt, how it seemed to throb with energy. So many cars, people, noise—even above the insanely loud music pumping through the van’s speakers, the sounds of the urban sprawl felt like a hand, reaching right through those trembling windows, grabbing at Scott’s skin. This was it. He was really here; this was actually happening. It was goddamn exhilarating. Nearly an hour later they were still engulfed by the thrill of it all when Shane shot a finger toward the window by his head.

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The building itself was massive, an old Spanish-style mansion with at least six bedrooms, a living room that could have doubled as a ballroom, and multiple decks overlooking downtown San José—a vista of sparkling lights, bolstered by the pulsing flare of the constant traffic that threaded between the buildings, like a radiated circulatory system feeding that ravenous urban sprawl. The party was mostly confined to the house’s massive pool deck. A DJ had set up shop on an elevated stage, the music from his spinning CDs blasting out of massive twin speakers that had been built right into one of the house’s exterior brick walls. At five minutes to midnight, Scott strolled through the party, pulling everyone he could find out of whatever trouble they had gotten into to lead them to the farthest railing that looked out over the city.

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

—Witold Rybczynski, author of City Life and The Most Beautiful House in the World “Suburban Nation provides a marvelously detailed critique of suburbia as it exists, a landscape most of us are intimately familiar with but few of us have thought much about … Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck write surprisingly pithy, elegant prose, and Suburban Nation is full of juicy insider observations drawn from the Orwellian world of suburban planning.” —Andrew O’Hehir, Salon “[A] bold and damning critique … [This] visionary book holds out hope that we can create ‘places that are as valuable as the nature they displaced.’” —Publishers Weekly “I am convinced that the explosion of urban sprawl over the last fifty years has played a part in the breakdown of America’s civic engagement. Suburban Nation calls on all of us to revolutionize how we use politics and public policy to shape our built environment—our local homes, towns, and cities—and ultimately the public life of our own communities.”

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Arnold, Henry. Trees in Urban Design. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993. Aschauer, David. “Transportation, Spending, and Economic Growth.” Report by the American Public Transit Association, September 1991. Benefield, F. Kaid; Matthew D. Raimi; and Donald D.T. Chen. Once There Were Greenfields: How Urban Sprawl Is Undermining America’s Environment, Economy, and Social Fabric. New York: National Resources Defense Council, 1999. Beyond Sprawl: New Patterns of Growth to Fit the New California. Report by the Bank of America, the Resources Agency of California, the Greenbelt Alliance, and the Low Income Housing Fund, 1995.

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Louis, Pruitt Igoe housing project San Antonio San Bernardino (California) San Diego San Francisco; Embarcadero Freeway Santa Barbara Santa Fe Savannah schools; consolidated districts; federal mandate on; in new towns and villages; state policies on; urban Schuster, Bud Seagrove (Florida) Seaside (Florida); architectural style of; civic buildings in; live-work units in Seattle security; private segregation, income-based Sennett, Richard sense of place septic-tank sprawl Sert, Jose Luis setbacks sewage facilities Shaker Heights (Ohio) shipping methods shootings, high school shopping centers; adjacency versus accessibility to; along highways; versus main streets; neighborhood-scale; see also malls sidewalks; width of Sierra Club Silvetti, Jorge single-family houses; architectural style of; builders of; design of, value and; facades of; federal loan programs for; in new towns and villages; taxes on; urban single-use zoning; adjacency versus accessibility in; investor security and; in regional planning site plans; of five-minute walk neighborhoods site-value taxation Sitte, Camillo smart growth, government policies on “smart streets,” Snyder, Mary Gail soccer moms social decline, environmental causes of social equity: greenfield development and; regional planning and Southern California Association of Governments South Florida Water Management District Soviet Union sparse hierarchy spatial definition special-needs populations, facilities for speeding Spivak, Alvin sports events, urban sprawl; aesthetics of; architectural style and; components of; design to combat; developers and; environmentalist attack on; government policies to combat; history of; homebuilders and; housing as largest component of; increased automobile use and; municipalities bankrupted by; parking requirements and; plans for; poverty and; principles for reshaping, see new towns and villages; proactive approach to fighting; regional planning and; road rage and; successes in fight against; traffic congestion created by; victims of squares, town Stalin, Joseph Stanford Research Institute, state policies stores, corner, see corner stores; see also retail streets: in new towns and villages; pedestrian-friendly, see pedestrian-friendly design; in subdivisions; termination of vistas on; traditional neighborhood; width of strip centers, see shopping centers Stuart (Florida) style, architectural subdivisions; adjacency versus accessibility of shopping to; anticipated costs of servicing; boring; connectivity of new neighborhoods and; construction costs for; “cookie cutter,” 48; crime in; and federal loan programs; homebuilders and; landscaping of; marketing of; open space in; permitting process for; public realm and; street design in subsidies, retail suicide, teenage Supreme Court, U.S.

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Laura Jackson, for example, cites evidence that pedestrian fatalities are most common in those parts of the USA where urban sprawl is the dominant form – despite walking being less prevalent in such locations, with consequential increases in obesity and hypertension (Ewing et al 2008). More profoundly, while a higher quality and quantity of social relationships are associated with health benefits, social stratification and income inequality is associated with increased mortality. Because urban sprawl is strongly associated with an absence of social capital, and with higher stratification in society, it is also increasingly seen as a main contributing factor to a range of negative health impacts culminating in the potential for higher mortality (Frumkin 2001: 209).

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As discussed below, it is likely that diminishing supplies of oil and climate change, rather than cultural preference, will result in a return to greater urbanity and greater concentration of population (though not necessarily in big cities). BOX 2.5 Smart Growth Growing concern about contemporary development patterns in the USA has led to the emergence of ‘smart growth’ (see www.smartgrowth.org). Smart growth advocates unify around the aim of changing what they regard as the undesirable impacts of (sub)urban sprawl, typically questioning the economic costs of abandoning infrastructure; the social costs of the mismatch between new employment located in the suburbs and the available workforce in the city; and the environmental costs of abandoning ‘brownfield’ sites, building on open space and prime agricultural lands at the suburban fringe, and increasing pollution by driving further (EPA 2001).

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Associated with a range of environmental, economic and social problems, automobile or car dependence exists where urban form and transport options are such that choices are limited to car use, with an associated range of environmental, economic and social problems (see Table 2.3). TABLE 2.3 Problems of Car Dependency Source: Newman & Kenworthy (2000: 109).EnvironmentalEconomicSocial • Oil vulnerability • Petro-chemical smog • Toxic emissions such as lead and butane • High greenhouse gas contributions • Urban sprawl • Greater storm-water problems from extra hard surfaces • Traffic problems such as noise and severance • External costs from accidents and pollution • Congestion costs, despite road building • High infrastructure costs in new sprawling suburbs • Loss of productive rural land • Loss of urban land to bitumen • Loss of street life • Loss of community • Loss of public safety • Isolation in remote suburbs • Access problems for those without cars and those with disabilities Peak Oil It is not merely car dependence that is a problem, but also the dependence of the global economy, contemporary society and the accustomed quality of life on the diminishing reserves of ready available and relatively cheap oil.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The destruction nowadays may be less blatant, but the rot is more insidious: decades of pesticide overuse and intensified agriculture has damaged soil structures and decimated our wildlife. Scientists are clear that agriculture is the main driver of species loss in Britain today. We have a mechanism for deciding how to constrain urban sprawl; it’s called the planning system. But ever since the Town and Country Planning Act was introduced in 1947, landowners have vociferously resisted extending its remit to cover farming and forestry operations. In the 1980s, amid mounting evidence that intensive agriculture had displaced urban sprawl as the driver of environmental destruction, campaigner Marion Shoard proposed applying planning ‘to the task of rescuing our landscape’. Today, it’s time to reopen that debate.

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Lodge Hill in north Kent, for example, is an old disused MOD base, which over the decades has reverted to wilderness and become the number one nesting site in the UK for nightingales. I’ve walked through part of it, a glorious tangle of hawthorn and oak, and a breath of fresh air for local residents looking to escape the urban sprawl along the Medway. Yet for years the MOD, under pressure from ministers to sell off land for housing, proposed bulldozing Lodge Hill to build 5,000 new homes. We need to build more homes, no question. Yet rather than fix the real stranglehold on house-building – the hoarding of land by private landowners in pursuit of higher land values – Whitehall has become obsessed with flogging off the remnants of its own estate, regardless of how the land has altered since it first acquired it.

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We need to make London’s Green Belt better serve the city’s inhabitants, by using more of it for community food growing and for nature. Currently, too much of the Green Belt is a welter of golf courses and land banks owned by shadowy firms. Free marketeers argue that we simply need to tear up the Green Belt and build housing on it. But quite apart from the massive urban sprawl and congestion this would generate, it would do little on its own to address the housing crisis – since landowners in the Green Belt would simply pocket huge windfall gains from the spike in land values, and the new housing would end up being sold at unaffordable prices. What we need instead is to rejuvenate the Green Belt so that it better fulfils its original purpose of providing green space and recreation for the public.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability by David Owen

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, delayed gratification, distributed generation, drive until you qualify, East Village, Easter island, electricity market, food miles, Ford Model T, garden city movement, hydrogen economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, linear programming, McMansion, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, Murano, Venice glass, Negawatt, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, peak oil, placebo effect, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, unemployed young men, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

., Canada: New Society Publishers, 2006), pp. 316-17. 30 Newman and Kenworthy, Sustainability and Cities, pp. 30-31. 31 Sharon Feigon and David Hoyt, “Land Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Transportation,” Center for Neighborhood Technology, 2003. 32 Ignacio San Martín, “The Character of Urban Sprawl and Its Indicators,” First Policy Forum on Urban Sprawl, Center for Environmental Studies, Budapest, Hungary, 2000. 33 The sprawling development of Phoenix is aptly described by the caption below a photograph on a NASA website: “Phoenix is actually surrounded by 22 towns and cities that have grown so closely together in recent decades it is almost impossible to distinguish one from another in this 30-meter-resolution satellite image.”

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See also anti-urbanism; suburbs and nonurban areas automobile’s role in consumer cost of power corporate campus public transit and Sierra Club campaign against traffic pattern improvement and in Washington D.C. zoning ordinances and Sprint Nextel Corporation building Standard Oil Strong, Gordon Strong, Steven J. suburbs and nonurban areas. See also anti-urbanism; sprawl acquisition and storage of possessions appeal of downsized automobiles environmental profile of home, automobile in grass cultivation inefficient use of resources necessity of automobiles outdoor activity population-dispersion concept sedentary lifestyle and obesity zoning sustainability.

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside by Dieter Helm

3D printing, Airbnb, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital map, facts on the ground, food miles, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, quantitative easing, rewilding, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

The threats to our urban environment out to 2050 are about both its size and its content. There can be little doubt there is going to be a lot more ‘urban’ in 25 years’ time. More greenfield and brownfield sites12 will be built on, new villages and towns will be built, and the built land area will absorb more and more of the Green Belt. There will be quite a lot of semi-urban sprawl for the ‘executive homes’ so beloved and profitable to the building companies. It is not inevitable that all of these developments will have less biodiversity than the land they concrete over. But concrete they will, and without strong net environmental gain compensations, the aggregate impacts are probably going to be worse.

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The Hobhouse Report16 led to the National Parks Act in 1949. It was part of the new planning framework that emerged in the late 1940s after World War II, largely within the ambit of local authorities. Green Belts would be the lungs of the cities; the planning framework would limit ribbon development and urban sprawl; and the National Parks would protect the uplands for the wider public’s enjoyment. Britain’s land has different purposes and should be divided up accordingly. It was a highly managed model. That was the theory. In practice, landowning interests watered down the National Park plans in two ways.

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Green infrastructure needs to be infrastructure for nature, designed with this purpose in mind, not an add-on afterwards. The outer rings – the Green Belt and what it could be The central urban areas abut the countryside, and they can do this in a variety of ways. Left to normal market forces, ribbon development and urban sprawl would result. Every builder loves a greenfield site. That is what happened in the 1930s and still happens across the USA. The problems with sprawl are not just the ugliness that John Betjeman wrote poems about.16 It is also that by stretching out the city, the access to the countryside is made much weaker for the people in the middle.

Extreme Rambling: Walking Israel's Separation Barrier. For Fun. by Mark Thomas

Boycotts of Israel, Dr. Strangelove, facts on the ground, liberation theology, Ocado, one-state solution, urban planning, urban sprawl

The Israeli city was started in 1982 but it feels like the builders were paid before they finished. Roads occasionally run out of pavement, piles of rubble appear in the street and roundabouts wait to be landscaped. I don’t know the correct architectural term for this place but I suspect it might be ‘urban sprawl’ or ‘urban sprawl … with a very long snagging list’. Palm trees sporadically line the roads or sit by bus shelters, but it is tower blocks that dominate the city, stacked side by side in pale brown and grey brick, block after block after block. Essentially, the settlement is a nice religious council estate.

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‘That’s Ma’ale Adumim, over in the hills.’ He points to the map once more, and an area called E1, a controversial development plan to extend from the northeast of Jerusalem, deep into the West Bank to the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. Once completed, it will connect the two cities into one large urban sprawl extending across the West Bank. Not only will it ensure there is no room for natural growth for Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem; it will also irrevocably cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, and break the West Bank in two. Richard Makepeace, the British Consul General, had explained one of the hazards of this type of expansion when we had walked with him earlier: ‘Every additional settlement that is built, every settlement unit – whether it is in Jerusalem or elsewhere in the Occupied Territories – that is a problem that has to be overcome in reaching a final status deal.’

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger

addicted to oil, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, big-box store, centre right, commoditize, credit crunch, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, Ford Model T, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, walkable city, white flight

Census at http://www .census.gov/prod/2005pubs/06statab/pop.pdf. 27. Our Built Environment, EPA, January, 2001, 231-R-01-002. 28. R. Ewing and R. Cervero, “Travel and the Built Environment: A Synthesis,” Transportation Research Board Record no. 1780 (2001): 87–114. 29. Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank, and Richard Jackson, Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004). 30. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis,” http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf. 31. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “2007 Draft U.S.

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., “New Data for a New Era: A Summary of the SMARTRAQ Findings,” Smart Growth America, January 2007, http:// www.smartgrowthamerica.org/documents/SMARTRAQSummary_000 .pdf. 34. Dr. William Rees, interview by Dr. Michael Gismondi, 2000, Aurora Online, http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/18/29. 35. Frumkin, Frank, and Jackson, Urban Sprawl and Public Health. 36. Lawrence D. Frank, Peter O. Engelke, and Thomas L. Schmid, Health and Community Design: The Impact of the Built Environment on Physical Activity (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003). 37. Lawrence Frank and Barbara McCann, “Driving, Walking, and Where You Live: Links to Obesity,” http://www.choices4health.org/resource Files/82.pdf. 38.

Smart Cities, Digital Nations by Caspar Herzberg

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, business climate, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hive mind, Internet of things, knowledge economy, Masdar, megacity, New Urbanism, operational security, packet switching, QR code, remote working, RFID, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart meter, social software, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, X Prize

Other environmental engineering feats, such as the pneumatic system that literally sucked household garbage down to a subterranean processing and recycling center, storm water capture, and grey water recycling for agriculture, could deliver residual benefits such as reduced traffic noise (there are no garbage trucks) and potable water saved for drinking rather than irrigation. Plus, the city was literally green: 40 percent of the IBD was open space, and its Central Park, located almost dead center of the district, may not have been the busy travel hub that defines an aerotropolis, but to Seoul residents, it was a welcome respite from relentless urban sprawl. Additionally, 40 percent of rooftops would become green space. In all, 75 percent of Songdo’s waste was to be recycled in some shape or form—it was a city that put pedestrians and cyclists before drivers and electric and high-occupancy cars in better parking spaces than standard gas-powered transport.

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Sensor networks could aid parking and downtown congestion (as in Barcelona). There is no denying that Chongqing wanted surveillance, and a great deal of it. Its infrastructure lacking, the municipality was working with Hangzhou-based Hikvision Digital Technology, the world’s largest supplier of video surveillance, to install and connect 500,000 cameras throughout its urban sprawl. This is many times the number of cameras employed by similarly sized cities (New York City, in 2013, doubled the number of surveillance cameras, bringing the city total to 6,000).16 In the United States, debate and indignation raged after the Wall Street Journal, working off interviews with Hikvision executives, reported that Cisco was close to finalizing a deal to help build the camera network.

The Great Lakes Water Wars by Peter Annin

clean water, Donald Trump, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), off grid, Ronald Reagan, urban sprawl

Every community that had diverted water from the Great Lakes since 1986 has had to return the water to the Basin—a principle that was strongly reiterated in the 2005 Compact. Advocates were particularly adamant that exceptions shouldn’t be made for sprawling suburban communities that have grown beyond their ecological means. The Great Lakes, they said, shouldn’t be used as a water subsidy for urban sprawl outside the Basin. If Waukesha residents want Great Lakes water, they should move to the water, rather than moving the water to them. The main point, environmentalists said, is that it’s time for people to think about water before they decide where to live—something that, they argued, people moving to Waukesha had failed to do.

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Environmental advocates argued that if a community has a water problem, people shouldn’t just continue moving there and assume the government will bail them out. “We’re concerned that Waukesha is the shape of things to come,” complained Susan Howatt, national water campaigner for the Council of Canadians. “We can’t get into these situations where we make it okay for urban sprawl to [receive] water diversions that aren’t sustainable.” But under WRDA and the Great Lakes Compact, environmentalists don’t have a vote. That responsibility is reserved for the Great Lakes governors. Back in 2005, how did the governors in other parts of the Basin feel about Waukesha’s claim to a return-flow exemption?

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They were just being included in the application so the sewer service area mirrored the water service area. Milwaukee officials remained interested in selling water to Waukesha, but they were adamantly opposed to selling water to the neighboring communities. They felt such a move violated the Compact and would contribute to urban sprawl. Milwaukee’s Common Council voted 14–0 to forbid Milwaukee to sell water to the expanded water-supply service area.9 That vote effectively took Milwaukee out of the running as a water supplier, because neither Waukesha nor the DNR would accept those limiting conditions. With its one-time water-supply front runner now out of the race, Waukesha inked a water-supply deal with Oak Creek.

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community by Ray Oldenburg

bread and circuses, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, feminist movement, fixed income, global village, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, New Journalism, New Urbanism, place-making, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Oldenburg, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, wage slave, young professional

In their kind and number, there has been a marked decline in gathering places near enough to people’s homes to afford the easy access and familiar faces necessary to a vital informal public life. The course of urban development in America is pushing the individual toward that line separating proud independence from pitiable isolation, for it affords insufficient opportunity and encouragement to voluntary human contact. Daily life amid the new urban sprawl is like a grammar school without its recess periods, like incurring the aches and pains of a softball game without the fun of getting together for a few beers afterward. Both the joys of relaxing with people and the social solidarity that results from it are disappearing for want of settings that make them possible.

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The simplicity of its requirements has made the third place a hardy perennial, capable of sprouting in a variety of forms in most urban cultures. It does not thrive universally, however. The third place is seldom found in America’s newer urban environments. Whether one looks where urban renewal has changed the older city or in the wake of the new urban sprawl, the Great Good Gathering Places are not to be found. That the third place so rarely and feebly takes root in the new “built environment” gives cause to wonder about the suitability of this habitat for healthful human habitation. We are, after all, social animals. We are an associating species whose nature is to share space just as we share experiences; few hermits are produced in any human culture.

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Community is a collective reality that does not depend upon the inclusion or exclusion of any given individual; to define it as a personal phenomenon is to pervert the concept. The concept of the personal community is catching on, however, and for at least two reasons. First, it permits us to retain the myth of a viable community form amid the atomization of life attending our chaotic urban sprawl. Second, networking is a useful aspect of careerism—individuals, as centers and overlords of their own communities, can tailor them to maximize their success in the career. It has personal appeal. Networks, as presently conceived and promoted, are anti-child. That danger, coupled with the popularity of the concept, demand that it be examined on its own terms.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think by Matthew Yglesias

Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, gentrification, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, land reform, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, pets.com, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, statistical model, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white picket fence

For the most impoverished, that often means putting up with squalid conditions in urban slums beset by high crime, bad schools, and generally substandard public services. For the middle class, and for most office and retail buildings, it simply means going someplace else. This phenomenon is the much-discussed urban sprawl. In Los Angeles, land near the coast or convenient to major employment centers is more expensive than land further inland. But restrictive zoning policies make it difficult for these desirable areas to house all of Southern California’s huge, growing population. Consequently, while the city of Los Angeles saw its population grow by just 2.6 percent between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, the surrounding L.A.

Culture Shock! Costa Rica 30th Anniversary Edition by Claire Wallerstein

anti-communist, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, card file, Day of the Dead, Easter island, fixed income, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, out of africa, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban sprawl

The remaining natural forest is deciduous, the trees losing their leaves in the unbearable summer heat. Cattle on the Guanacaste plains—the archetypal scene of the north. Overview of the Land and History 39 In between the two extremes lies the Meseta Central, the central highland plateau which is now home to well over half the country’s population in the urban sprawl of San José and its surrounding towns. This is the traditional coffee-growing area, and the climate is mild thanks to the altitude—San José stands 1,150 m (3,773 ft) above sea level—and temperatures rarely exceed 25°C (77°F). Both coasts are hot, and are home to steamy banana and African palm plantations (excluding the Guanacaste part of the Pacific coast).

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The population is very young, with 26.7 per cent of Ticos under the age of 14, and only 6.2 per cent over 65. Ticos have also become, in recent decades, a very urban people (even though they retain many rural habits). Around half of the population lives in the greater San José area alone, and more than two-thirds in the urban sprawl of the Meseta Central. ‘White Ticos’ and Ideas of Colour It has only been a few decades since Costa Rican tourist literature trumpeted the ‘whiteness’ of the people as an attraction. In his 1943 Nueva Geografía de Costa Rica, author Jorge León said the country was ‘effectively the white state of the Caribbean... in Heredia, 96.6 per cent of the population are direct descendants from Europe—a little more than in New York’.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

So far it seems that many planners are choosing to ignore developments - despite its notorious traffic congestion issues, Los Angeles’ 2015 ten-year vision, “Mobility Plan 2025”, doesn’t even mention driverless cars. Less than 3% of the transportation plans for the 50 most populous cities in the US even mention the transit impacts of ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft, let alone driverless cars. Expert opinion on the impact of driverless cars on urban sprawl is divided. On one side, the argument goes that if driverless cars free up parking and garage space, there will be plentiful affordable new residential capacity negating the need for people to move further from city centres for affordable housing. On the other side, the argument goes that if people can be otherwise occupied during even a long commute, they will still be willing to move further from the city centre or their place of employment to have the residence they wish, perhaps with larger gardens than typical closer to the city.

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reload=true&tp=&arnumber=5409622&url=http:%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4149681%2F5409610%2F05409622.pdf%3Farnumber%3D5409622 [38] http://360.here.com/2014/04/30/jams-game-theory-equations-science-of-traffic/ [39] http://engineering.illinois.edu/news/article/21938 [40] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox [41] http://chester.faculty.asu.edu/library/access39_parking.pdf [42] http://www.transportationlca.org/losangelesparking/ [43] Rethinking a Lot (2012), Eran Ben-Joseph [44] http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/CruisingForParkingAccess.pdf [45] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/10082461/Motorists-spend-106-days-looking-for-parking-spots.html [46] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/news/london-parking-space-goes-on-sale-for-350000/ [47] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/us/12parking.html [48] Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, Joel Garreau, 2011 [49] http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21720269-dont-let-people-park-free-how-not-create-traffic-jams-pollution-and-urban-sprawl [50] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/Housing_Development_Toolkit%20f.2.pdf [51] Bending the Cost Curve – Solutions to Expand the Supply of Affordable Rentals.” Urban Land Institute Terwilliger Center for Housing: 19. 2014 [52] https://twitter.com/NelsonNygaard/status/684042745216798720 [53] http://www.uspirg.org/news/usp/new-report-shows-mounting-evidence-millennials%E2%80%99-shift-away-driving [54] https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/751 [55] http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/a-future-of-self-driving-cars-were-ready-now/ [56] http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35242514 [57] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-travel-survey-2014 [58] http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/ [59] http://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/car-of-future-is-autonomous-electric-shared-mobility [60] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_car [61] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/411471/road-traffic-forecasts-2015.pdf [62] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant [63] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/02/29/are-americans-leaving-cars-behind/ [64] Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation, Edward Humes, 2016 [65] http://la.curbed.com/2016/9/9/12824240/self-driving-cars-plan-los-angeles [66] http://sustainablemobility.ei.columbia.edu/files/2012/12/Transforming-Personal-Mobility-Jan-27-20132.pdf [67] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5 [68] http://www.segway.com/ [69] https://www.wired.com/2016/10/teslas-self-driving-car-plan-seems-insane-just-might-work/ [70] Alphabet is Google’s parent company and owner of Waymo, formerly known as Google Self Driving Car project

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

However, while social connectivity is good for exchanging ideas and making financial transactions, it also speeds up more dubious activities and virus transmissions. When the pandemic and social distancing called into question dense urban life, skyscrapers took on a new meaning. While compact cities may have contributed to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, its opposite, urban sprawl, may have been a cause. Zoonotic diseases, which spring from animals to humans, are a result of our increasing wildlife-human interface. They are partially a consequence of the destruction of nature through deforestation and unbridled suburbanization. If we can limit our human footprint by creating compact cities, we may be able to better protect our forests and wildlife.

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Even our greenest cities waste energy on shipping food from thousands of miles away. We can minimize these “food miles” by incorporating agriculture into our buildings. This way, cities can be agriculturally productive instead of being consuming islands relying on a vast periphery of greenhouses and watersheds. Urban sprawl erases more farmland every year—we are losing an area as large as Denmark annually, with much of it in Asia.42 Already, restaurateurs and homeowners are pruning herbs, greens, and small fruits on the sides of buildings. Vertical gardens may even be coming to your high-rise apartment soon. Next time you need a clump of basil, you may be able to extend your hand from your apartment window, and pick from trellises or revolving trays.

Are Trams Socialist?: Why Britain Has No Transport Policy by Christian Wolmar

active transport: walking or cycling, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, BRICs, congestion charging, Crossrail, Diane Coyle, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Network effects, railway mania, trade route, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

The fundamental error of transport policy based on the spread of the automobile is precisely that it was designed to increase mobility rather than accessibility, and it resulted in planning policies that then actually reduced accessibility for many people. The negative aspects of decades of car-based policy, such as the crowding out of other road users and the encouragement of urban sprawl, which, in turn, entrenched the car’s primacy, were all too easily ignored. The car provided fantastic extra mobility for those who could afford to own one, but by destroying alternatives the options available to those who did not were greatly restricted. And, even more ironically, as cars increased in number, their advantages began to be outweighed by their disadvantages.

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, intermodal, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

It’s deep in the American psyche isn’t it? Man and nature. The great paradox of a nation that invades and degrades the wilderness and yet treasures it above all else.’ ‘Guess so.’ ‘New York State contains this, the great outdoors, the American dream of the woods and wilderness but also the industry, the suburbs, the great urban sprawl and of course Manhattan. Maybe New York State is symbolic of all America, embodying both the call of the wild and the call of the street.’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘You’re right. I’m talking drivel. I’ll shut up now.’ I am happy to say that no deer were killed in the making of our scene. In fact we didn’t even see a deer, which suited me.

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It is clear that her apprehension of what spooks, stresses and alarms an animal is extremely accurate: I wonder however if someone will come close one day to understanding what thrills, delights and pleases an animal? Do they respond to beauty in nature, for example? Can they detect, appreciate and value the difference between a dull urban sprawl and a mighty mountain landscape? * * * COLORADO KEY FACTS Abbreviation: CO Nickname: The Centennial State Capital: Denver Flower: Rocky Mountain columbine Tree: Colorado blue spruce Bird: Lark bunting Mineral: Rhodochrosite Motto: Nil Sine Numine (‘Nothing Without Providence’) Well-known residents and natives: John Kerry, Horace ‘Go West Young Man’ Greeley, James Michener, Allen Ginsberg, Clive Cussler, Antoinette ‘Tony Award’ Perry, Ken Kesey, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Bill Murray, Roseanne Barr, Tim Allen, Don Cheadle, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Paul Whiteman, Glenn Miller, John Denver

Istanbul Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

car-free, carbon footprint, low cost airline, supply-chain management, the built environment, urban sprawl, yield management

The building was originally known as the Church of the Holy Saviour Outside the Walls (Chora literally means 'country' and Kariye is the Turkish version of the ancient Greek word Khora, which means the same thing), reflecting the fact that when it was first built it was located outside the original city walls built by Constantine the Great. Within a century the church and the monastery complex in which it was located were engulfed by Byzantine urban sprawl and enclosed within a new set of walls built by Emperor Theodosius II. Around AD 500, the Emperor Anastasius and his court moved from the Great Palace of Byzantium in Sultanahmet to the Palace of Blachernae, a new complex built close to the point where Theodosius' land walls met the old sea walls on the Golden Horn.

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İstanbul Today As the 21st century gets into gear, this meeting point of Europe and Asia is revelling in the unprecedented growth and prosperity it has achieved over the past decade. It's also getting larger – the official population is 14 million, but most locals think that 20 million is a more accurate estimate, leading to huge problems with urban sprawl and inadequate infrastructure. Best in Music Mercan Dede A major name on the international World Music scene, Dede's distinctive Sufi-electronic techno-fusion is showcased in his albums Sufi Dreams (1996), Journeys of a Dervish (1999), Sayahatname (2001), Nar (Fire; 2002), Sufi Traveller (2003), Su (Water; 2004), Nefes (Breath; 2006), 800 (2007) and Dünya (Earth; 2013).

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism by Mikael Colville-Andersen

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, business cycle, car-free, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Enrique Peñalosa, functional fixedness, gamification, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, self-driving car, sharing economy, smart cities, starchitect, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

It’s important to connect public transport with bicycles, whether it is combining bikes and trains or providing safe infrastructure to and from stations outside of city centers. In Copenhagen, roughly 50 percent of the bicycle infrastructure had been removed in the two decades of redesigning the streets for cars. Copenhagen has sprawl. The third-largest urban sprawl in Europe, actually. People can commute for a hour and a half or more by car to get to the city, as in many other places. Intermodality is the key. Riding your bicycle to the local train station and combining travel modes helps increase bicycle share. The main point here is that few people are going to ride long distances.

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In Denmark, Danish State Railways (DSB) has been transporting passengers with bikes almost since the bicycle was invented. Greater Copenhagen is served by the S-Train network—S-tog in Danish—and for many years passengers had to buy a reasonably priced bike ticket. In 2010, DSB decided to make bikes free on all their red S-Trains that transport people to and from the city from the far reaches of our urban sprawl. It was a bold move, but far from being an example of corporate social responsibility, it was simply a clever business model. They assumed correctly and rationally that bikes don’t travel alone, so by making it free, there were good odds of increasing the number of paying passengers. Boy, did they nail it.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

DARPA and the CIA were originally motivated to fund AI precisely because of the promise it held for detecting enemy signatures—the tank hiding in woodland, the coded radio message passed between commanders. It’s ever harder to hide from modern AI, with its increasingly sophisticated sensors and real-time analysis. Cluttered environments, like densely populated urban sprawl will continue to offer some advantage to the defenders seeking cover-from-view. But a look at state-of-the-art surveillance in China demonstrates the changing intelligence landscape. A range of AI-enabled technologies, including biometrics and facial recognition, allows watchers to cut through the clutter.

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Later, the analysts can spool footage backwards from the crime scene to follow the perpetrator back to their home, or their associates. Or they can spool forward to see where they go next. This technology, now used by city police forces in America, was originally designed for the military, seeking out insurgents in the urban sprawl of Baghdad. The next step, already underway, involves automating that process. Doing so would help overcome some big bottlenecks in tasking and analysis. With rapidly expanding fleets of drones, the American Air Force, and its ally the UK’s Royal Air Force, are struggling to recruit enough operators.5 The work is an unusual combination of tedium and stress.

The rough guide to walks in London and southeast England by Helena Smith, Judith Bamber

Alfred Russel Wallace, Isaac Newton, land tenure, the market place, trade route, urban sprawl

Originally a royal hunting ground, Epping Forest was opened to the public in 1878, since when it has been managed by the Corporation of London. Covering some six thousand acres, the forest is London’s largest public open space, and its sheer scale comes as a surprise to the first-time visitor, not least because of its proximity to the urban sprawl. It remains a popular spot, and at any time of year you can expect to share the forest with plenty of horse-riders and cyclists, as well as many fellow walkers. This circular walk heads from Chingford station up to Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge before heading north into the heart of the forest.

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This route starts from Goring-by-Sea, at the far edge of the sprawling seaside town of Worthing, west of Brighton. It runs via a small hillfort and the village of Clapham, through woodland to attractive Findon, where the Gun Inn is a reliable pub lunch stop. From here you climb up to Cissbury Ring, a vast hillfort with sweeping sea views. The path then descends to Worthing, with some urban sprawl to get through before you reach the station. The route doesn’t give you the feeling of unspoilt isolation common to the other South Downs walks in this chapter – aside from Cissbury Ring the downland here has been cultivated and its long contours divided into strips of field. But there are plenty of attractions: the thirteenth-century church at Clapham; the venerable boozer with its World War II associations; and the majesty of Cissbury Ring itself.

Lonely Planet Mexico by John Noble, Kate Armstrong, Greg Benchwick, Nate Cavalieri, Gregor Clark, John Hecht, Beth Kohn, Emily Matchar, Freda Moon, Ellee Thalheimer

AltaVista, Bartolomé de las Casas, Burning Man, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, language acquisition, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines, urban sprawl, wage slave

And the Chilangos, or defeños, or capitalinos, or whatever you name the locals, are a remarkably patient and helpful bunch. Yet it’s impossible to overlook the city’s very real problems. Kidnappings and taxi holdups, often dangerous levels of ozone and airborne particulates, intolerable traffic jams, overcrowded public transportation, practically unlimited urban sprawl: name your poison, it’s here. But the polluted air improved considerably after the introduction of strict emission controls, and downtown streets have been made unquestionably safer than in previous decades. Remember that Mexico City is, and has ever been, the sun in the Mexican solar system.

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Several on-campus routes also operate outside metro Universidad with limited service on weekends and during vacation periods. Coyoacán Coyoacán (‘Place of Coyotes’ in the Náhuatl language), 10km south of downtown, was Cortés’ base after the fall of Tenochtitlán. Only in recent decades has urban sprawl overtaken the outlying village. Coyoacán retains its restful identity, with narrow colonial-era streets, cafés and a lively atmosphere. Once home to Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo (whose houses are now fascinating museums), it has a decidedly countercultural vibe, most evident on weekends, when assorted musicians, mimes and crafts markets draw large but relaxed crowds to Coyoacán’s central plazas.

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Radio Maxi Seguridad ( 5768-8557, 5552-1376) Sitio Parque México ( 5286-7129, 5286-7164) Taxi-Mex ( 9171-8888, 5634-9912) Taxis Radio Unión ( 5514-8124) Return to beginning of chapter Around Mexico City * * * NORTH OF MEXICO CITY TEPOTZOTLÁN TULA TEOTIHUACÁN PACHUCA AROUND PACHUCA EAST OF MEXICO CITY PUEBLA CHOLULA POPOCATÉPETL & IZTACCÍHUATL TLAXCALA CACAXTLA & XOCHITÉCATL LA MALINCHE HUAMANTLA CANTONA CUETZALAN YOHUALICHÁN TEHUACÁN RESERVA DE LA BIOSFERA DE TEHUACÁN-CUICATLÁN SOUTH OF MEXICO CITY TEPOZTLÁN CUERNAVACA XOCHICALCO TAXCO PARQUE NACIONAL GRUTAS DE CACAHUAMILPA WEST OF MEXICO CITY TOLUCA NEVADO DE TOLUCA MALINALCO IXTAPAN DE LA SAL * * * With its daunting size and seemingly endless urban sprawl, the megalopolis of Mexico City may seem a challenging place to escape from, yet thousands of Chilangos (Mexico City residents) do so every weekend. Fast toll roads fan out in all directions to the cities, towns and the so-called pueblos mágicos (magical villages) that surround the Distrito Federal, taking you surprisingly easily into a world of ancient ruins, well-preserved colonial towns and beautiful mountain scenery.

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

In 2010, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing at the University of Waterloo released a report called ‘Caught in the Time Crunch: Time Use, Leisure and Culture in Canada.’ Its findings were not surprising. For one thing, it reported that Canadians ‘perceive and spend time much differently than they once did,’ and that leisure and cultural activities were changing as a result. Urban sprawl and longer commutes had shrunk free time while laptops and smartphones created a workforce that was perpetually on call. Longer working hours, providing care to an aging population and working non-standard shifts have also devoured more time and reduced leisure. Further, time constraints were worse for people ‘marginalized by race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, dis/ability, gender, sexual orientation and language proficiency, [and who] experience systemic barriers to social and economic opportunity.’

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William R. Easterly

Andrei Shleifer, business climate, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, endogenous growth, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Money creation, Network effects, New Urbanism, open economy, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

And because growth involves losers as well as winners, it’s easy to see why there has always been a vocal antigrowth faction, even aside from the concern for the environment. On the web is a site for the Preservation Institute, a group that calls for ”the end of economic growth.”18 1999 study warns, ”Urban sprawl is undermining America’s environment, economy, and social fabric.”19 The historian Paul Kennedy notes that economic change ”like wars and sporting tournaments” is ”usually not beneficial to all.” Progress benefits some ”just as it damages others.”20Browsing the library, I find titles like Sustainable Development Is Possible Only If We Forgo Growth,EconomicGrowthandDecliningSocialWelfare, DevelopedtoDeath,ThePoverty of Afluence,TheCosts of Economic Growth, andthemorerestrained GrowthIllusion:HowEconomic Growth Has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many, and Endangered the Planet?

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Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 5 (October): S12-37. Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew. 1996. Ethnic Cleansing. New York St. Martin’s Press. Belser, Patrick. 2000. “Vietnam: On the Road to Labor-intensive Growth.” World Bank Policy Research Paper 2389. July. Benfield, F.Kaid, Matthew D. Raimi, and Donald D. T.Chen. 1999. Once There Were Greenfields: How Urban Sprawl Is UnderminingAmericas’sEnvironment,Economy,and Social Fabric. New York: Natural Resources Defense Council. 315 References and Further Reading Benhabib, Jess, and Mark Spiegel. 1994. ”Role of Human Capital in Economic Development: Evidence from Aggregate Cross-country Data.” Journal of Monetary Economics 34 (October): 143-173.

Lonely Planet Colombia (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Tom Masters, Kevin Raub

airport security, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Downton Abbey, El Camino Real, Francisco Pizarro, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, land reform, low cost airline, off-the-grid, race to the bottom, sustainable-tourism, urban sprawl

Much like the carnival in Rio de Janeiro, there are street bands, masquerade and fancy dress, live performances, and a riotous, slightly unhinged atmosphere as the town drinks and dances itself into the ground. It can be rough and ready, and you need to keep an eye on your possessions and your companions, but let your hair down and it could be a highlight of your trip. Barranquilla is a huge urban sprawl, with its fair share of unsafe barrios. Most of the cheap accommodations can be found around Paseo Bolívar (Calle 34), but this area is seedy – just check the number of army personnel present even during the day. If you'd like to stay in a more pleasant environment, try El Prado. However, if you're coming for carnaval, be sure to secure your hotel reservations months in advance, or you'll have no chance at all.

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At any other time of the year, you'll likely only visit the bus station on your way to much more agreeable Santa Marta or Minca, and your experience of Barranquilla will simply be of its bad traffic. Santa Marta %5 / Pop 448,000 / Elev 2m Santa Marta is South America's oldest surviving city and the second most important colonial city on Colombia's Caribbean coast. But despite its long history and charming center, it gets a bad rap from many travelers, who rightly cite its unsightly urban sprawl and terrible traffic as reasons not to hang about here. The secret to Santa Marta is to use it for what it does well: hotels, restaurants and bars, and then get out to the slew of superb destinations nearby during the daytime. It's as a base that Santa Marta excels: come here for a destination in itself and you can easily be disappointed.

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Finca Barlovento features open-air beds that jut out on a deck over the sea, so the waves crash right under your mattress. The food is simply sensational. Palomino %5 / Pop 4000 Palomino doesn't look like much as you pass through it on the main Santa Marta–Riohacha highway, but lurking on one side of its urban sprawl is one of Colombia's most perfect beaches, while on the other are the dramatic Sierra Nevada Mountains, a place the Wayuu people still guard carefully from outsiders. Palomino makes a great base from which to explore both, with a number of great places to stay and a backpacker vibe you'll not find in many other places along the coast.

Lonely Planet Chile & Easter Island (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy, Kevin Raub

California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, Colonization of Mars, company town, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, QR code, rewilding, satellite internet, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Aquitania is 150m south. Note that Viña Cousiño Macul is located only 2km away. Viña Cousiño Macul WINERY ( 351-4135; www.cousinomacul.cl; Av Quilín 7100, Peñalolén; tours incl 1 varietal & 1 reserva CH$8000; tours 11am, noon, 3pm & 4pm Mon-Fri in English, 11am & noon Sat; Quilín) A pretty winery set in Santiago’s urban sprawl. Most of the vineyards are now at Buin, but tours take in the production process and underground bodega, built in 1872. It’s a 2.25km walk or a quick taxi ride from the metro. Viña Almaviva WINERY ( 470-0225; www.almavivawinery.com; Av Santa Rosa 821, Paradero 45, Puente Alto; tours incl 1 pour US$80; by appointment only 9am-5pm Mon-Fri) This boutique vineyard runs in partnership with Baron Philippe de Rothschild.

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Chileans consider Concepción a socialist hotbed – mainly because of the intellectual influences of its dozen or so universities. Concepción sits on the north bank of the Río Biobío, Chile’s only significant navigable waterway, about 10km from the river’s mouth. Hills block the city’s expansion to the south and east, so Concepción’s urban sprawl is moving rapidly in the opposite direction, toward Talcahuano, 15km to the northwest. History In 1551 Pedro de Valdivia founded the original city of Concepción north of where it is today, near Penco (indeed, Conce’s inhabitants are still known as Penquistas). Over the next few centuries the city was repeatedly besieged during the Spanish-Mapuche war, attacked by British and Dutch pirates and devastated by earthquakes in 1730 and 1751.

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Punta Arenas 061 / POP 130,136 A sprawling metropolis on the edge of the Strait of Magellan, Punta Arenas defies easy definition. It’s a strange combination of the ruddy and the grand, witnessed in the elaborate wool-boom mansions and port renovations contrasted with windblown streams of litter and urban sprawl. Set at the bottom of the Americas, it is downright stingy with good weather – the sun shines through sidelong rain. Magellanic hospitality still pervades local culture, undeterred (or perhaps nurtured by) nature’s inhospitality. The city is remarkably relaxed and friendly. Recent prosperity, fed by a petrochemical industry boom and growing population, has sanded down the city’s former roughneck reputation.

The Linguist: A Personal Guide to Language Learning by Steve Kaufmann

borderless world, British Empire, discovery of DNA, financial independence, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, language acquisition, South China Sea, trade liberalization, urban sprawl

From the waiting room of the train station I could just make out the rows of low traditional peasant houses behind the posters with 46 A Personal Guide to Language Learning slogans exhorting the people to greater revolutionary efforts. Today, this quiet village has become one of the largest cities in China, a vast urban sprawl of modern skyscrapers and thriving capitalism, and a leader in high tech, fashion and more. As a foreigner, I was automatically seated in the soft seat section on the train to Canton (today’s Guangzhou). This entitled me to a cup of flower tea, which was regularly refreshed with more hot water by an attendant as the train rode through Southern Guangdong Province with its hills of red earth and green rice fields.

Peak Car: The Future of Travel by David Metz

autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, bike sharing, Clayton Christensen, congestion charging, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, driverless car, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Ford Model T, gentrification, high-speed rail, Just-in-time delivery, low cost airline, megaproject, Network effects, Ocado, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez canal 1869, The future is already here, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

Given that both travel generally and car use per person are no longer increasing, what now drives the growth of total travel are demographic factors—population growth, urbanisation and increasing longevity. Planning policy There has been much debate amongst planners and policy makers about the merits of city versus suburban living. In Britain, a general concern to protect the countryside has led to the adoption of ‘green belts’ around many cities—areas of countryside where urban sprawl will be resisted. One result has been the movement of people, housing and employment into towns and villages beyond the green belts. This in turn has prompted calls for an urban renaissance, aimed at both protecting the countryside from house building on greenfield sites and preserving the vitality of the central core of cities.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

In 2008 Clean Up The World started to use it to highlight places of particular crisis as well as show the impact of the International Clean Up Weekend. It is also being used to track the loss of the Antarctica ice cap, the depletion of the rainforest in Amazonia, measuring the largest oil spills in the world’s oceans13 as well as the extent of urban sprawl in cities like Houston and Phoenix. Google Earth is already having an unexpected impact on urbanism. In Dubai, islands are being designed to be seen from the air. Palm Jumeirah is a man-made island that spans out into the Gulf in the shape of a palm leaf that can be seen by satellite or aeroplane.

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I have followed a well-worn rite of passage that comes to many comfortably secure people living in the city in the western world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We have moved to what many people call the ‘inner suburbs’ of London, the ring of development that encircled the city during the first decades of the twentieth century. Here, we are no longer within easy distance of the centre, but looking down our perfectly regular street northwards I see urban sprawl all the way to the horizon. Our house was built in 1907 when pasture was turned over to tarmacadam and respectable housing, built with a hint of Elizabethan historicism, aimed at middle-ranking professionals who could get into St Pancras Station within fifteen minutes on the commuter train. Home in north London When we bought it, the house had been kept in its original state, but like many others in the street we have adapted it to our modern tastes.

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

“We drive up and down the gruesome, tragic suburban boulevards of commerce, and we’re overwhelmed at the fantastic, awesome, stupefying ugliness of absolutely everything in sight… as though the whole thing had been designed by some diabolical force bent on making human beings miserable.” Atlanta is an extreme case in point. Just a few years after Kunstler wrote, Time magazine featured it as the classic exemplar of American urban sprawl: “Once wilderness, [metro Atlanta is] now a 13-county eruption, one that has been called the fastest-spreading human settlement in history. What it leaves behind is tract houses, access roads, strip malls, off ramps, industrial parks and billboards advertising more tract houses where the peach trees used to be.”

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.* Today, Grant Park has turned back into a safe, desirable community, as I discovered when I stayed overnight with Sarah Toton and Micah Wedemeyer in their classic three-bedroom bungalow, built in 1907, with hardwood floors, high ceilings, and a huge oak in the backyard on Park Avenue, adjacent to the park’s northeastern section. They bought it for $363,000 in 2013, which seemed a bargain to me. The young Iowa couple came reluctantly to Atlanta for Toton to attend grad school at Emory University in 2003. “I never wanted to move to Atlanta. I heard it was a cancer on America with its urban sprawl.” Now they love it. In Grant Park there are frequent festivals, bike and running races, and other events, and they are close to everything, including the BeltLine Eastside Trail, where Wedemeyer, a computer programmer, rides his bike. It’s a great place to live, with the park and zoo (the Cyclorama is moving to Buckhead to the Atlanta History Center), the Grant Park Coffeehouse, and many nearby restaurants.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

For instance, in small opt-in samples on Prolific Academic, one group of white Republican voters scored the problem of ‘unchecked urban sprawl’ a 51 out of 100, but another group of white Republicans who saw the question as ‘unchecked urban sprawl caused by immigration’ scored it 74/100 (italics added for emphasis). Likewise, among a sample of white British Brexit voters, the problem of ‘pressure on council housing’ scored a 47/100 but ‘immigrants putting pressure on council housing’ was rated 68/100. In both cases, it logically cannot be the case that the immigration-driven portion of the problem of urban sprawl or pressure on council housing is more important than the problem itself.

City Parks by Catie Marron

Berlin Wall, crony capitalism, Easter island, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, the High Line, time dilation, urban sprawl

XOCHIMILCO IS ONE OF SIXTEEN delegations (the equivalent of arrondissements in Paris, or boroughs in London or New York) that make up the Federal District, the enormous, palpitating heart of Mexico City. Xochimilco used to be a separate town, but it was one of the many localities enveloped by the urban sprawl that turned Mexico City into a monster of about 22 million souls in the last fifty years. In Xochimilco alone, there are close to half a million residents and about fifty neighborhoods. But when people talk about Xochimilco, they’re usually referring to a network of canals—extending more than a hundred miles—that snake through certain parts of the district.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

The third area is the Bio City. An urgent lock-down of the destructive ecological tendencies of urban life is required. The air, water and land ecosystems that cities depend upon are being intensely degraded, and resources are being depleted and commodified. There are vast deadzones of alienated urban sprawl and dereliction, retail areas, highways and industry where residents have little connection with the natural systems that underpin human flourishing. Worse, there’s a binary division between us humans and the nature out there. This leads to us treating nature as something external rather than as a life-support system we depend upon.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

The effect is a bit like a night on the town with Dad’s credit card: We do a lot of things that we wouldn’t do if we had to pay the whole bill. We drive huge cars, we avoid public transportation, we move to far-flung suburbs and then commute long distances. Individuals don’t get the bill for this behavior, but society does—in the form of air pollution, global warming, and urban sprawl. The best way to deal with this growing problem is not the stuff that laissez-faire conservatives usually talk about. It is higher taxes on gasoline and cars. Only with those kinds of measures, as we shall explore in Chapter 3, will the cost of climbing behind the wheel of a car (or a hulking SUV) reflect the real social cost of that activity.

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We talk about how important education is, but we make it difficult and time-consuming for smart people to become teachers (despite evidence that this training has little impact). We don’t pay good teachers more than bad ones. We make it artificially cheap to travel by car, implicitly subsidizing everything from urban sprawl to global warming. We assess most of our taxes on productive activity, like work, savings, and investment, when we might raise revenue and conserve resources with more “green taxes.” If we get the incentives right, we can use markets to do all kinds of things. Consider the case of rare diseases.

World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Their ability to manage and control migration into, and often across, their territories affects the talent strategies and population management planning of world cities. Their choices about where to locate national military, trade, research or scientific facilities can have big impacts on agglomeration. Their planning policies and regimes can enable or constrain the local governments in world cities as they try to adapt to infrastructure demand, reverse urban sprawl and make developments more attractive to international capital. The way they lobby for intergovernmental rules, treaties and regulations has big implications for their leading ­cities’ reach and competitiveness. Their response to key industries during economic downturns, whether through economic stimulus, grants or tax, tariff and regulatory adjustments, can inject momentum for a new cycle of growth in a sector, or can stop it in its tracks.

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Bessis, H. (2016). Is the new ‘Greater Paris’ authority too weak to get things done?. City Metric. Available at http://www.citymetric.com/politics/new‐greater‐paris‐authority‐too‐weak‐get‐ things‐done‐1894. Accessed 2016 Mar 14. Blais, P. (2010). Perverse Cities: Hidden Subsidies, Wonky Policy, and Urban Sprawl. Vancouver: UBC Press. Bremner, C. (2010). Euromonitor International’s Top City Destination Ranking. Euromonitor. Available at http://blog.euromonitor.com/2010/01/euromonitor‐internationals‐top‐city‐­ destination‐ranking.html. Accessed 2016 Jan 21. Bremner, C. (2015). Top 100 City Destinations Ranking.

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton

Frank Gehry, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl

In order to alleviate overcrowding, the ancient low-rise buildings would have to be replaced by a new kind of structure only recently made possible by advances in reinforced concrete technology: the skyscraper. ‘2,700 people will use one front door,’ marvelled Le Corbusier, who went on to imagine ever taller towers, some housing as many as 40,000 people. When he visited New York for the first time, he came away disappointed by the scale of the buildings. ‘Your skyscrapers are too small,’ he told a surprised journalist from the Herald Tribune. By building upwards, two problems would be resolved at a stroke: overcrowding and urban sprawl. With room enough for everyone in towers, there would be no need for cities to spread outwards and devour the countryside in the process. ‘We must eliminate the suburbs,’ recommended Le Corbusier, whose objection was as much based on his hatred of what he took to be the narrow mental outlook of suburbanites as on the aesthetics of their picket-fenced villas.

Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World by Christian Wolmar

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, book value, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, company town, high-speed rail, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, precautionary principle, railway mania, refrigerator car, side project, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, urban sprawl

The Illinois Central deliberately set out to attract suburban dwellers and the railways, therefore, were responsible for urban sprawl a couple of generations before the motor car made it possible for every town, rather than only those blessed with a suburban railway network, to expand in that way. Commuting railways were transforming life in big cities all around the world, greatly extending the area in which workers could live. This changed the nature of cities, stimulating the creation of what are now called central business districts that can be served by train with high office blocks densely concentrated in an area of expensive land, while allowing urban sprawl to outer areas where land is cheaper.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Jane’s vision was hopeful, and she made an impact. Her text is required reading in urban studies. Her ideas have become conventional wisdom. Our world is more livable because of her. Sadly, not all cities got the message. As my black Uber car cruises the freeways of San José, I’m besieged by the image of urban sprawl. It’s hard to feel at home in a place like this. But it’s not just the office parks and strip malls that are making me uncomfortable. I’m worried about meeting Sophie. Part of the reason I don’t participate in the sharing economy is I’m an introvert, and a shy one too. Hotels are easy. Staff rarely say more than hello.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

It took Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragette movement slightly more than a decade to force the British government to give women the right to vote.14 The Soviet Union seemed so solid as to be eternal, but once cracks started to appear, the edifice crumbled in just a few months.15 In 1939 General Motors presented visitors to the World’s Fair in New York City with an imaginative vision of what the future could look like. It was called Futurama and consisted of an enormous model of multiple high-rise buildings, vast suburbs, and large motorways for travel between them, necessitating the use of cars.16 Imagination is going to be critical as we work to transform today’s urban sprawl to make it fit for the future. Some futurists have predicted that in the course of a decade, the rise of the autonomous, shared, on-demand electric car means we will need 80 percent fewer cars on the roads than we do now.17 This will free up huge areas of urban space that are currently used as parking lots.

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, business logic, Cass Sunstein, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, IBM and the Holocaust, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, new economy, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl

Local governmental bodies, such as city councils and school and park boards, should play greater roles in the regulatory system, as they are often more accessible to citizens than federal and state agencies and more willing and able to forge alliances with citizen groups around particular issues (as they have done effectively in relation to, among other things, restrictions on advertising in schools, urban sprawl, "box" retailers, and environmentally damaging practices ). The roles of trade unions and other workers' associations in monitoring and regulating the behavior of corporations should be protected and enhanced, as should those of environmental , consumer, human rights, and other organizations that represent interests and constituencies affected by what corporations do.

Bike Snob by BikeSnobNYC

book value, call centre, car-free, fixed-gear, gentrification, Kickstarter, messenger bag, safety bicycle, urban sprawl

However, unless you count rivulets of dog urine, there were no streams on or near Merrick Road, rippling or otherwise. There also weren’t any cyclists, apart from the odd delivery person riding a department store bike on the sidewalk. There were, however, many used car lots, as well as an abundance of fast-food chicken restaurants. Still, despite the urban sprawl, it wasn’t impossible to imagine a time when this was a country road teeming with cyclists. While more or less straight, Merrick Boulevard isn’t dead straight, like newer roads. Instead, it follows the mild grade and contour of the land like an older road does. And as any cyclist knows, the difference between a plumb-straight road and an “organic” one is huge.

Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving by Jason Torchinsky

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, interchangeable parts, job automation, Philippa Foot, ransomware, self-driving car, sensor fusion, side project, Tesla Model S, trolley problem, urban sprawl

And sure, you can take the subway or bus almost anywhere in New York City, but if you want to leave the city, you’re going to have to use a car—either by driving one yourself or getting someone else (taxi, Uber, easily manipulated friend, or unusually well-trained and capable dog) to take you there. No matter how good a city’s public transportation system is, it’s still not the same as having your own, independent car. Now, I know many people consider private cars to be horrible environmental disasters that have created urban sprawl and soulless suburbs, and are awful, violent things that are destroying everything. While, sure, some of these things are no doubt true, that’s a miserable and pretty limited way to look at cars and driving. A personal car also offers one of the most powerful and fulfilling modes of mobility that human beings have ever enjoyed.

India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, blue-collar work, book value, Bretton Woods, business climate, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, congestion charging, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Induced demand, inflation targeting, invisible hand, land reform, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, obamacare, Pareto efficiency, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban sprawl, vertical integration, working-age population

Space precludes discussion of problems in urban land markets, other than government land acquisition policies. The urban land ceiling acts which froze up land markets in cities for many years36 have now thankfully gone. But various distortions remain. To take just one example, the rigid ‘floor space index’ (FSI) requirements in cities encourage urban sprawl and hugely increase transport costs for residents. India’s cities are far less dense compared with international good practice. It would make good sense to relax FSI requirements by charging those who wish to exceed them a price [ 96 ] The Growth Challenge 97 that reflects the extra burden they will impose on urban infrastructure (after allowing for the saving on transport costs).37 The Capital Market and Bankruptcy Arrangements A competitive modern economy needs swift and efficient procedures to deal with company distress, insolvency, and exit.

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Rationalizing government spending in the agricultural sector (see Chapter 6) and charging economic prices for farm inputs would help to fight water scarcity as well as save energy. Changing the balance of domestic transport from road to rail would increase productivity and also reduce GHG emissions. More efficient urbanization policies, including energy-​efficient public transport, would reduce urban sprawl and congestion while furthering climate mitigation. Fears that climate mitigation policies would entail a major growth sacrifice are overblown. Consider, for example, the report of the Expert Group appointed by the Planning Commission on low-​carbon strategies, chaired by Kirit Parikh.46 This concluded on the basis of an economy-​wide optimizing model that the growth-​rate decline from 2007 to 2030 as a result of low-​carbon strategies would be small (a decline of only 0.15 percentage points compared with the base case), while India’s annual per capita carbon emissions would fall from a 2030 baseline of 3.6 tonnes to 2.6 tonnes.

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

Journey 1: Tokyo to Niigata You can begin to understand much about Japan’s agricultural history simply by driving around, because that history is so heavily dependent on topography. A journey from Tokyo north-west across the main island of Honshu to Niigata prefecture, producer of the country’s finest rice, highlights the basic challenges. First, however, you must exit from Tokyo’s urban sprawl. The capital, with its silent, strange residential suburbs, its little lanes and its religiously maintained road markings, ends only in theory. In practice it merges into a series of other, less prosperous towns in a seamless continuum of low-rise clapboard houses, malls, discount stores, fast-food restaurants and car showrooms.

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Not only has Japan developed with an impossibly small supply of cultivable land per capita, but large swathes of that land have been relentlessly gobbled up by its urban and industrial development. This trend has long been exacerbated by a cultural aversion to high-rise building. The insistence on low-rise, sadly, has done nothing to make modern Japanese construction more attractive. Avoiding expressways, it is a 40-kilometre, two- to three-hour grind through spirit-sapping urban sprawl, past the vast American Yokota air base, before you see anything remotely rural to the north-west of Tokyo. What happens is that eventually the hills become too steep to build on or, indeed, to farm. And that is the reason why Japan has so little cultivable land – the country is covered in hills and mountains, which in turn are covered in forests.

The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, accounting loophole / creative accounting, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, California high-speed rail, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cross-subsidies, Ford Model T, high-speed rail, intermodal, James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban sprawl, vertical integration

These lines were run informally, and rarely for profit: “The engineer might well be the president of the company, the brakeman his brother.”34 One kind of local line did prosper, however. This was the period when the number of commuting services began to spread, notably in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, stimulating the growth of the urban sprawl that would later be served so much better by the automobile. In fact, as early as the 1840s, a few railroads had begun offering “commuted” tickets—reduced fares for regular use—to stimulate travel, but demand was limited, as there were few businesses needing such workers or, indeed, suburbs from which they could commute.

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He saw that good transportation was as essential as ensuring the houses had water and electricity and therefore was not concerned that he lost money on providing it: “The result was the characteristic low-rise form of the region, with mile upon mile of ‘California bungalows’ spreading along the tentacles of the Pacific Electric Network. This extensive urban spread gave Los Angeles a reputation, which has lasted to this day, as the very model of urban sprawl.”19 Lots that were a half-dozen blocks away from the streetcar were simply left undeveloped, but once the car became commonplace, they were built upon and their residents’ automobiles soon displaced the streetcars on the highway. Development of these interurban streetcars was so intensive in parts of the Midwest that it was possible in 1910 to travel continuously by interurban from Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, to Oneonta, New York, a distance of nearly eleven hundred miles.

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

Like the rest of the world, then, military training sites are rapidly being urbanized. Colonel Thomas Hammes, writing in the US Marine Corps Gazette in 1999, was one of many defence planners then asserting the need to build new mock cities because US military training sites were out of phase with ‘the urban sprawl that dominates critical areas of the world today. Continuing in that vein, he wrote, ‘We know we will fight mostly in urban areas. Yet, we conduct the vast majority of our training in rural areas – the hills of Camp Pendleton, the deserts of Twenty Nine Palms, the woods of Camp Lejeune, the jungles of Okinawa, Japan’.4 The US military’s response has been dramatic.

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For such vehicles merely promote increased oil consumption and dependence, which will only deepen current and future crises and insecurities.38 With suburbanization and sprawl – a project so critical to the mass adoption of SUVs – now threatened by oil depletion, the paradox is pronounced indeed. One influential critic of urban sprawl, Jim Kunstler, is convinced that ‘the grand meta-cycle of the suburban project as a whole’, within which SUVs now play such a major role, is ‘at the end of the cycle’. To him, ‘the remaining things under construction are the last twitchings of a dying organism’ – a process accelerated by the US recession, brought on by a credit crunch generated largely by criminally lax lending of largely fictitious capital to fuel yet another massive round of sprawl and exurbanization.39 Kunstler argues that US suburban history, climaxing in mass SUV ownership and hypersprawl, must be interpreted through the lens of oil geopolitics: The suburban expansion has been based entirely on cheap-and-abundant supplies of oil.

Discover Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Bartolomé de las Casas, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, food miles, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, urban decay, urban sprawl

The entire place is no secret though, and you won’t be alone, but it’s easy to escape the crowds by walking down the bay. There are a number of beachside restaurants. Detour: Les Saintes These tiny islands to the south of Basse-Terre are many people’s highlight of Guadeloupe, as they allow visitors to enjoy a slice of the old Caribbean, far from the development and urban sprawl that has affected much of the region. These tiny charmers are a real secret – many day-trippers come over from Basse-Terre, but very few people spend any real time here exploring these gems. Don’t miss your chance. Lying 10km off Guadeloupe is Terre-de-Haut, the largest of the eight small islands that make up Les Saintes.

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Martinique POP 400,000 Volcanic in origin, Martinique is a mountainous stunner crowned by the still-smoldering Mont Pelée, which wiped out Martinique’s former capital of St-Pierre in 1902. Martinique offers a striking diversity of landscapes and atmospheres. While it suffers from uncontrolled urban sprawl in some places, particularly in and around the busy capital, Fort-de-France, life – and travel – becomes more sedate as one heads north or south through some of the island’s delicious scenery. The rainforested, mountainous northern part is the most spectacular, but the south has its fair share of natural wonders, including lovely bays and miles of luscious beaches.

Lonely Planet Southern Italy by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Google Earth, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, post-work, Skype, starchitect, urban decay, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Mt Vesuvius Rising formidably beside the Bay of Naples, Mt Vesuvius forms part of the Campanian volcanic arch, a string of active, dormant and extinct volcanoes that include the Campi Flegrei’s Solfatara and Monte Nuovo, and Ischia’s Monte Epomeo. Infamous for its explosive Plinian eruptions and surrounding urban sprawl, it’s also one of the world’s most carefully monitored volcanoes. Another full-scale eruption would be catastrophic. More than half a million people live in the so-called ‘red zone’, the area most vulnerable to pyroclastic flows and crushing pyroclastic deposits in a major eruption. Yet, despite government incentives to relocate, few residents are willing to leave. 1 Sights Mt VesuviusVOLCANO (%081 239 56 53; www.parconazionaledelvesuvio.it; crater adult/reduced €10/8; hcrater 9am-6pm Jul & Aug, to 5pm Apr-Jun & Sep, to 4pm Mar & Oct, to 3pm Nov-Feb, ticket office closes 1hr before crater) Since exploding into history in AD 79, Vesuvius has blown its top more than 30 times.

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The rolling green valley is criss-crossed by drystone walls, vineyards, almond and olive groves, and winding country lanes. This is the part of Puglia most visited by foreign tourists and is the best served by hotels and luxury masserias (working farms) or manor farms. Alberobello %080 / Pop 10,750 Unesco World Heritage Site Alberobello resembles an urban sprawl – for gnomes. The zona dei trulli on the westernmost of the town’s two hills is a dense mass of 1500 beehive-shaped houses, white-tipped as if dusted by snow. These drystone buildings are made from local limestone; none are older than the 14th century. The town is named after the primitive oak forest Arboris Belli (beautiful trees) that once covered this area.

Italy by Damien Simonis

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, bike sharing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, company town, congestion charging, dark pattern, discovery of the americas, Frank Gehry, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, large denomination, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, period drama, Peter Eisenman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

A ticket valid for 90 minutes costs €1.20 (single ride €0.70) and an all-day ticket costs €3.50. Tickets can be used on main-line trains within the city limits, as well as on the new wheelchair-accessible metro (www.genovametro.com), which has numerous stations across the city. Return to beginning of chapter AROUND GENOA Nervi A former fishing village engulfed by Genoa’s urban sprawl, modern Nervi classifies itself as a ‘resort’. Though, with plenty of ritzier Riviera competition, it’s rarely top of anyone’s vacation list. Its saving graces are its bounty of museums – four in total – and its 2km cliffside promenade, the Passeggiata Anita Garibaldi. The most celebrated museum is the Galleria d’Arte Moderna ( 010 372 60 25; Via Capolungo 3; adult/child €6/5; 10am-7pm Tue-Sun), displaying works by 19th- and 20th-century artists such as Filippo De Pisis, Arturo Martini and Rubaldo Merello.

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For information on the Alpine ski resort of Bormio, in Valtellina’s far eastern reaches, see Parco Nazionale dello Stelvio, Click here. Trains link Milan with Sondrio (€7.80, two hours, every two hours) and terminate further east at Tirano. From Sondrio, buses connect the Valtellina’s resorts and towns. Return to beginning of chapter BRESCIA pop 189,700 Urban sprawl, a seedy bus and train station area, and the odd skyscraper don’t hint at Brescia’s fascinating old town, which serves as a reminder of its substantial history. Brescia already had centuries of (now- obscure) history behind it when the Romans conquered the Gallic town in 225 BC. The Carolingians took over in the 9th century, and were followed by a millennium’s worth of outside rulers, including the Venetians.

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Desenzano del Garda pop 26,610 The lake’s main transport hub, Desenzano del Garda, is more residential than its lakeside counterparts, and many tourists pass straight through with barely a backward glance. But while Desenzano is not as quaint as some other spots, it’s also not as touristy and buzzes with activity year-round. Hidden amid its urban sprawl is an attractive old port and historic centre. You can get information on the town here from the tourist office ( 030 374 99 90; Via Porto Vecchio 34; 10am-12.30pm & 3-6pm Mon-Fri, 10am-12.30pm Sat). Right on the lakefront by Desenzano’s main beach, Hotel Europa ( 030 914 23 33; www.desenzano.com; Lungolago Battisti 71; s/d €62/104; ) is a breezy modern place with a good restaurant.

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities by Witold Rybczynski

benefit corporation, big-box store, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, fixed income, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Seaside, Florida, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The Utrillo-like drawings, by Orfeo Tamburi, a Paris-based artist, reminded readers that American cities, no less than their European counterparts, have a tradition of urban living. Subsequent articles in the series, written by Fortune editors Francis Bello, Seymour Freedgood, and Daniel Seligman, as well as Whyte, covered transportation, city administration, slums, and urban sprawl. The reports are striking for their intelligence, detail, length—and sense of urgency. The common message was that American cities had a unique opportunity to renew themselves, but they had to get it right. Jacobs’s article was the last in the six-part series, though not by design. Fortune’s publisher, C.

Demystifying Smart Cities by Anders Lisdorf

3D printing, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bike sharing, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion pricing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Google Glasses, hydroponic farming, income inequality, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, Masdar, microservices, Minecraft, OSI model, platform as a service, pneumatic tube, ransomware, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, smart cities, smart meter, software as a service, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

The famous French modernist architect and city planner, Le Corbusier, wrote an interesting book, The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning, in the start of the previous century in which he summed up two basic approaches to developing the city: “Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going (..) the pack-donkey meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter brained and distracted fashion, he zigzags in order to avoid larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain shade; he takes the line of least resistance.” The pack donkey becomes the image of the irrational unreflected way of city planning known from the medieval towns, urban sprawl, and slums all over the world. If you have ever admired the winding roads of city centers of Paris, Rome, Zurich, or Copenhagen, you would have experienced the particular charm of a city planned by the way of the pack donkey. Conversely, the way of man with his straight lines and right angles can be seen in the rational Roman grid–based cities that formed the inspiration for many American cities like New York, Minneapolis, and Lima.

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings by Helen Jukes

fear of failure, Google Earth, urban sprawl

But getting a hive won’t save the bees, who don’t and never have needed our keeping. If we want to do something to help them we’d do better to turn our attention to flowering habitats beyond the hive, on which they do depend. Wetland, woodland, wildflower pasture – all have been diminished over the last century in a hot wave of intensive agriculture and urban sprawl. I scoop the sticky crumbs from the books and floorboards, return them to my plate. So what is attracting us to beekeeping, if it’s not directly about saving the bees – and how do we become better custodians of their future? Perhaps it’s unfair to see the resurgence only as another form of avoidance of what’s really happening outside, to our climate and landscapes.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

Not surprisingly, the authors report that PAHs seem to be on the rise: “USGS findings show that concentrations of total PAHs in the majority of lakes and reservoirs in urban and suburban areas across the nation increased significantly from 1970 to 2001. The increases were greatest in lakes with rapidly urbanizing watersheds (urban sprawl); for example, over the last 10 years, the concentrations of PAHs in Lake in the Hills (suburban Chicago, Illinois) increased tenfold as the watershed was rapidly developed.” three to one: Douglas M. Main, “Parking Spaces Outnumber Drivers 3-to-1, Drive Pollution and Warming,” Purdue University News Service, September 11, 2007.

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slightly higher in Belgium): Pocket World in Figures 2007 (London: Economist, 2007). risk of traffic fatalities: See Theodore E. Keeler, “Highway Safety, Economic Behavior, and Driving Environment,” American Economic Review, vol. 84, no. 3 (1994), pp. 684–93, and Reid Ewing, Richard A. Schieber, and Charles V. Zegeer, “Urban Sprawl as a Risk Factor in Motor Vehicle Occupant and Pedestrian Fatalities,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 93, no. 9 (2003), pp. 1541–45. Belgium had 522: World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention, op. cit., p. 198. fairness of the process: Tom R. Tyler, Why People Obey the Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'Homme

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, William Langewiesche

Bush to label it a major disaster area, and cut public utilities’ water withdrawals by 10 percent. Then Perdue joined hands with supporters on the statehouse steps to pray for rain. To some, the calamity was no surprise. Years of pro-growth policies and lax zoning had led to poor water management and urban sprawl; hydrologists had warned Georgia for nearly two decades that such a drought was possible, but legislators had never developed a coherent response. In the 1990s, plans to build a network of state reservoirs were defeated, largely by developers who were angered that they would not be allowed to build homes around the new lakes.

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., 81 Uganda, 197 ultrapure water, 113, 339 ultraviolet (UV) disinfection, 111 Umma, 199 Unconfined Aquifer, 144 United Kingdom (UK), 75, 76, 267 floods in, 200, 204, 212 United Nations (UN), 93, 124, 145, 268, 276, 352 Development Goals of, 199 Food and Agriculture Organization of, 352n water crisis warnings of, 12, 127, 194, 196, 199 United States: annual wastage of water in, 120 assumptions about drinking water in, 9–10, 126 desalination plants in, 331 droughts in, 12, 128, 133, 361–62 energy demand in, 280 flood control in, 210–13 floods in, 12, 95–96, 128, 204, 207–8, 209–10, 326, 354–55 natural gas use in, 286 need for national water policy in, 354 population growth in, 280 water use in, 125–26, 186–87 see also specific regions and states United Water, 2, 271–72 United Water Resources, 2 Unquenchable (Glennon), 341–42 Upper Clark Fork River, 41 Upper Talarik Creek, 305 Upper Yellowstone River, 85 uranium, 20 urban heat-island effect, 132–33 urbanization: global, 124, 204 see also cities urban sprawl, 154, 206 usufructuary rights, 137 Utah, 169–70, 171, 174, 288 Vaca Partners, 147, 149 Valencia, Pablo, 131–32 value: paradox of (diamond-water paradox), 13, 343 of water, 13, 166, 167, 176–77, 240, 250, 266–67, 343–45, 355–56 Van Cortlandt Park Valve Chamber, 121–22, 124 Vanity Fair, 276, 286 Venice, Italy, 212 Veolia, 265, 266, 268, 269–70, 272, 273, 276 Vermont, 299 Verrado, Ariz., 327 Vibrio cholerae, 107 Vidler Water Company, 159 Vietnam War, 220 Villaraigosa, Antonio, 157, 158 vintners, viniculture, 137 Virginia, 83 water-quality standards of, 79 Virginia Institute of Marine Science, 90 Virginia Poultry Federation, 86 Virgin River, 160, 175 “virtual water,” 137 VISTA, 312 Vivendi, 270, 274 Volta River, 130, 196 Vonnegut, Bernard, 328 Wade, Michael, 193, 251–52 Waldrop, Bob, 320 Wall Street Journal, 101, 265, 273, 320, 333, 337 Wanger, Oliver, 246 Warm Springs Dam, 185 War of 1812, 217 Wasatch Mountains, 167 Washington, 318, 319, 357 Washington, DC, 55, 67, 71, 83 Washington Post, 91, 99 Waste Management Healthcare Solutions, 68 wastewater treatment, see recycled wastewater; sewage treatment, sewage treatment plants water: as axis resource, 4–5, 13, 14, 239, 265, 343, 355 bottled, see bottled water commodification of, 260–66, 268, 277 as defining resource of twenty-first century, 343 energy used by treatment, conveyance, and heating of, 278, 279 fixed supply of, 12, 129, 166, 235, 239, 343–44 global distribution of, 129 as human right, 266, 267–68, 277 power generation use of, 125–26, 278–91 rationing of, 240 as renewable resource, 343–44 valuation of, 13, 166, 167, 176–77, 240, 250, 266–67, 343–45, 355–56 “wet” vs.

Fodor's Barcelona by Fodor's

Albert Einstein, call centre, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, low cost airline, market design, Suez canal 1869, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Cons: Barceloneta offers few hotel opportunities, while the Port Olímpic’s principal offering, the monolithic Hotel Arts, can feel like a tourist colony away from the rest of town. Pedralbes, Sarrià & Upper Barcelona Neighborhood Vibe: Upper Barcelona is leafy and residential, and the air is always a few degrees cooler. Pedralbes holds Barcelona’s finest mansions; Sarrià is a rustic village suspended in the urban sprawl. Pros: Getting above the madding fray and into better air has distinct advantages, and the upper reaches of Barcelona offers them. A 15-minute train ride connects Sarrià with the Rambla. Cons: The only drawback to staying in upper Barcelona is the 15-minute commute to the most important monuments and attractions.

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The right end of the beach is the home of the Club Natació de Barcelona and there is a semi-private feel that the beaches farther east seem to lack. Platja de Gavà-Castelldefels A 15-minute train ride south of Barcelona near the Gavà stop is a wider and wilder beach, with better water quality and a windswept strand that feels light years removed from the urban sprawl and somewhat dusty beaches of Barcelona. Alighting at Gavà and returning from Castelldefels allows a hike down the beach to Can Patricio or any of the other beach restaurants dishing out delicacies like calçots or paella. Previous Chapter | Beginning of Chapter | Next Chapter | Contents Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Contents Bicycles and In-line Skates | Golf | Gyms and Spas | Hiking | Scuba Diving | Sailing and Windsurfing | Swimming | Tennis Bicycles and In-line Skates Cruising Barcelona on wheels, whether by bike or skate, is a good way to see a lot, and save on transport.

The Discovery of France by Graham Robb

Brownian motion, deindustrialization, Honoré de Balzac, Louis Pasteur, New Economic Geography, Peace of Westphalia, price stability, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban sprawl

Even at the end of the nineteenth century, some hunters believed that marmots pulled each other along like carts and that chamois and bouquetins (ibex) swung themselves headlong down sheer cliffs by stabbing their horns into the earth. Many of the wild inhabitants of France were no better known than the human inhabitants of the French colonies. * ROADKILL AND URBAN SPRAWL are modern innovations, but even two centuries ago there were signs that the discovery and colonization of France would bring devastation and death to animals. Domestic animals in towns were protected by the Grammont Law, but the only protection for animals in the wild was provided by occasional hunting restrictions, and most hunters found that these only enhanced the thrill of the chase.

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In Lou Pouèmo dóu Rose (The Poem of the Rhône, 1896), the poet Mistral looked back a generation as though to ancient times and compared the grooves cut by the barges’ cables on the stone embankments to the ruts of chariot wheels on Roman roads. The fairgrounds of Beaucaire are now a long, flat riverbank of weeds and rubbish haunted by dog-walkers and bored teenagers. Fortunately, economic development is not the only measure of urban health. Now that many large cities are surrounded by Stygian fields of concrete tedium, urban sprawl looks like an obnoxious side effect of prosperity and decline. The oceanic awfulness of northern Paris and the disheartening suburbs of Marseille exact a heavy toll from travellers who come in search of aesthetic pleasure. Yet until the mid-nineteenth century, the suburbs of Marseille were one of the great sights of southern France.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

EVs do not address social inequality within and between countries, especially in the Global South, where e-cars may well be an option only for the powerful and wealthy. And even if they could be made widely available, EVs do not ‘solve’ the problems of road traffic congestion, parking pressures, safety or transport poverty. Car dependence gives rise to urban sprawl and sets in motion a vicious cycle whereby places and jobs become less and less accessible by other means, which leads to subsequent falls in the use of public transport and, in turn, reduced revenue and cuts in service levels, resulting in an even greater dependence on cars, and so on. The flipside of the freedom afforded by widespread individual car ownership is that an increasing number of people are being forced to own a car which they struggle to afford and which they maintain at the cost of sacrificing other things in their lives.

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My neighbour and I have different definitions of wealth. The land is a sharp reflection of the worldview of the peoples who care for it, or don’t. My orioles fly over hundreds of miles of land degraded by the outcomes of the western worldview, miles of pavements, mines, oil rigs, frack wells flaring methane, industrial sacrifice zones, urban sprawl. Many of the green places are monocrop agriculture – fields or forest plantations toxic with herbicides and nothing to eat. This, the worldview of human exceptionalism, understands land primarily as natural resources, property, capital and ecosystem services; this worldview is not One Bowl, One Spoon, but the land as a warehouse of commodities where the spoon is the property of just a few members of a single species.

Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

BOAT Punts, canoes and rowing boats are available for hire from Avon Boating by Clopton Bridge – it’s under the Thai Boathouse restaurant. Return to beginning of chapter STAFFORDSHIRE Stoke-born novelist Arnold Bennett once wrote that Staffordshire was ‘unsung by searchers after the extreme’, but that doesn’t mean that it’s boring. Wedged between the urban sprawls of Birmingham and Manchester, the county is surprisingly beautiful, from rolling Cannock Chase, a magnet for walkers and cyclists, to the jagged backbone of the Peak District known as the Roaches. The stern might of Lichfield’s cathedral, the wild rides at Alton Towers, and the neoclassical mansion of Shugborough are among the county’s other charms.

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Then in medieval times the town grew fat on the wool trade. It is also the birthplace of Charles Darwin (1809–82), who rocked the world with his theory of evolution. Orientation Shrewsbury’s near-island status helps preserve the Tudor and Jacobean streetscapes of its centre and protects it from unattractive urban sprawl. The train station is a five-minute walk northeast of the centre and is as far as you’ll need to venture. Information Library ( 01743-255300; Castle Gates; 9.30am-5pm Mon, Wed, Fri & Sat, 9.30am-8pm Tue & Thu, 1-4pm Sun) Free internet access. Royal Shrewsbury Hospital ( 01743-261000; Mytton Oak Rd) Tourist office ( 01743-281200; www.visitshrewsbury.com; Music Hall, The Square; 9.30am-5.30pm Mon-Sat, 10am-4pm Sun May-Sep, 10am-5pm Mon-Sat Oct-Apr) Guided 1½-hour walking tours (adult/child £3.50/1.50) leave the tourist office at 2.30pm Monday to Saturday, and 11am Sunday from May to September and at 2.30pm Saturday only from November to April.

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The communities had to then rely on their own resources, gradually becoming reabsorbed into the war-band culture of the native Britons – for some generations soldiers had been recruited locally in any case. Orientation Hadrian’s Wall crosses beautiful, varied landscape. Starting in the lowlands of the Solway coast, it crosses the lush hills east of Carlisle to the bleak, windy ridge of basalt rock known as Whin Sill overlooking Northumberland National Park, and ends in the urban sprawl of Newcastle. The most spectacular section lies between Brampton and Corbridge. Carlisle, in the west, and Newcastle, in the east, are good starting points, but Brampton, Haltwhistle, Hexham and Corbridge all make good bases. The B6318 follows the course of the wall from the outskirts of Newcastle to Birdoswald; from Birdoswald to Carlisle it pays to have a detailed map.

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World by Srdja Popovic, Matthew Miller

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, desegregation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Rosa Parks, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, urban sprawl

Between the temperature and the stress, it’s hard not to get headaches. Still, there’s one place in the city that’s relatively relaxing. It’s an arti cial beach on the eastern side of the island. While this beach is not much by the Maldives’ standards—it’s really just a thin strip of sand in the middle of the urban sprawl—the beach is your best option if you nd yourself in Malé and want to escape the city. Here, at least, there are a few open-air cafés facing the ocean that attract hip young Maldivians, and you can always see a few middle-aged men smoking hashish in the nearby bushes. Women dressed in burkas will bring their children to frolic in the surf, and depending on the season whole sections of the beachfront are taken over by either young surfers or skateboarders.

Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air freight, business process, clean water, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Mahatma Gandhi, precautionary principle, pushing on a string, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, Rubik’s Cube, urban sprawl, work culture

People may be afraid of the term activist because they associate it with ecosabotage and violent protests, but I’m talking about normal citizens who want the government to live up to its obligation to protect our air, water, and all other natural resources. Activists have infectious passion about the issues they support, whether they are mothers fighting to clean up toxic landfills that are killing their children or farmers losing their fourth-generation family businesses to urban sprawl. These are the people on the front lines, trying either to make the government obey its own laws or to recognize the need for a new law. That’s why our earth tax, 1 percent of our net sales, goes primarily to them. I’ve learned from a lifetime of being outdoors that nature loves diversity. It hates monoculture and centralization.

Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About the Great Good Places at the Heart of Our Communities by Ray Oldenburg

Celebration, Florida, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, land bank, market design, New Urbanism, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, The Great Good Place, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city

Unlike European autobahns, our interstate highways were routed right through our cities such that local travelers found the roads congested by people who didn’t even want to be in town. Street systems were designed in such a way that most roads carry too little traffic while others carry too much. Unifunctional zoning encouraged urban sprawl such that not only do Americans have to drive everywhere they go but, their necessary destinations are farther away from home than are those of peoples in other countries are from their homes. Finally, the auto industry managed to kill the trolley systems and put forty vehicles on the road in place of the one vehicle that carried the same number of passengers.

Protecting Pollinators by Jodi Helmer

Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, Columbine, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, the scientific method, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

This was despite the fact that most (73 percent) of the abstracts in individual studies used terms like accurate, reliable, and statistically similar to describe the data collected from citizen scientists; just 8 percent of researchers used terms like overestimated, contradictions, or no significant correlations to describe data from laypeople. Box 7-3 Pollinators Seek Out Urban Addresses How do pollinators fare among skyscrapers, freeways, and urban sprawl? Quite well, it turns out. One study showed that there were as many bees in urban landscapes as in farmland and nature reserves—and bee diversity was actually higher in cities than on farms. A separate study found that native bees provided adequate pollination services in San Francisco despite the urban setting.

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, car-free, congestion pricing, COVID-19, crossover SUV, desegregation, Donald Trump, Elaine Herzberg, gentrification, global pandemic, high-speed rail, invention of air conditioning, Lyft, megacity, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, wikimedia commons

(Photo: New York City DOT) Since New York City added a bike lane and a bus lane on Queens Boulevard, pedestrian deaths and injuries there have plummeted dramatically. (Photo: New York City DOT) Only eleven thousand people lived in Clayton County in 1940.22 Today’s population is more than two hundred times as large. Atlanta’s notorious urban sprawl has long since leap-frogged past Clayton County altogether, toward Henry and Fayette Counties to the south. Clayton County is now a suburban county. But the face of the suburbs is changing, and in many ways, the old infrastructure is ill-suited to this new era. Clayton County saw its first big boom in the mid-1970s, as blue-collar white workers flooded into the county, fleeing desegregation orders in the Atlanta public schools.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

By maintaining the perspective of changes in the standard of living as viewed by the consumer, we omit most topics related to urban planning, urban politics, and the regulation of electric utilities. The spread of the city is treated in chapter 5, in which the development of the city is viewed as a corollary of a succession of transportation innovations that steadily increased the distance that was feasible to travel between the home and the workplace. Decisions that encouraged urban sprawl after World War II are reserved for chapter 10, on housing after 1940. Another deliberate omission from this chapter is the effect of the business cycle. The ease or difficulty of finding jobs varied across recession intervals and across decades, and the decline in the standard of living during the Great Depression stands out.

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Howard Johnson’s 1925 drug-store soda fountain in Quincy, Massachusetts, began a chain of roadside restaurants that by 1939 had 132 franchised outlets and in the 1950s and 1960s had a dominant market position, with about 1,000 outlets.137 Harland Sanders developed his famous chicken recipe in 1930 at “Sanders’ Servistation” in Corbin, Kentucky; J. F. McCullough founded what became Dairy Queen in Kankakee, Illinois, in 1938.138 The victory of the motor vehicle was not without controversy. Government policies encouraged urban sprawl and undermined the financial viability of urban transit and passenger railways. Even before World War II, public policy was skewed in favor of the automobile by building streets and highways with public funds while leaving urban transit and the interurban electric railways to operate as self-sufficient private companies.

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“Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29, no. 3 (summer): 51–60. Prieto, Luis, and Sacristan, Jose A. (2003). “Problems and Solutions in Calculating Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs),” Health Qual Life Outcomes, December 19. www.ricbi.nim.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC317370/. Puga, Diego. (2008). “Urban Sprawl: Causes and Consequences,” Eis Opuscles del CREI, no. 18 (January). Pursell, Carroll. (2007). The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology, 2nd ed. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. Radde, Bruce. (1993). The Merritt Parkway. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press. Radford, Gail. (1992).

A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", active measures, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, data science, distributed generation, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban sprawl, young professional

Of course, higher oil prices also drive up the cost of any activity that requires energy, including irrigation, running farm equipment, delivering goods to market, and shipping foods to and from processing plants. All of these economic and social problems are growing worse just as global environmental trends are threatening the future of agriculture around the world. Climate change and drought are turning vast areas that were once fertile farmlands into deserts. The need for new farmland and continuing urban sprawl are driving deforestation, which further accelerates global warming. Scientific simulations suggest that while climate change will slightly increase the total amount of land available for farming, the overall quality of croplands will decline. What’s more, the regions most vulnerable to loss of farmland are already some of the most economically troubled areas of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and North Africa.6 One of the countries that is most immediately impacted is my homeland of Bangladesh, the world’s most densely populated country, which is a flat country with 20 percent of its land less than 1 meter above sea level.

Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet by Ian Hanington

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Day of the Dead, disinformation, do what you love, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, Exxon Valdez, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl

Although it is encouraging to see more people take greater responsibility for the food they eat by choosing to buy local, we can’t let governments off the hook. Politicians need to support local agriculture by implementing policies and laws that protect farmland, ensure that farmers receive a fair price for the food they grow, and remove regulatory barriers that hinder farm-gate sales. The protection of rich agricultural soil from urban sprawl, roads, industrial development, and other land use must be central to any government local food strategy. Study after study has shown that valuable agricultural land around the world is being chewed up and paved over because of poor urban-planning decisions that value parking lots, new highways, and larger strip malls over keeping our precious bank of fertile soil for current and future generations of farmers to steward—for our benefit.

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Sanders, biofilm, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, low interest rates, McMansion, medical malpractice, old-boy network, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Better methods will allow scientists to routinely address more complex traits, such as the elusive matter of taste, which is controlled by multiple genes. Chetelat said he viewed it as a time of opportunity. But, unfortunately, time could be running out for the wild populations upon which future discoveries may depend. Modern agricultural practices and urban sprawl eliminate habitat for wild tomatoes. Herds of goats, llamas, alpacas, and other domestic animals eat and trample them. Even though the Rick Center can produce seed from previously gathered wild specimens, thereby maintaining genetic lines, Chetelat insisted that collections preserved by humans, however carefully, are no substitute for what he calls “in situ” plants, meaning ones that grow in their native environments without human interference.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

You could increase GDP, say by building on greenfield sites or getting people to work longer hours, but in GPI terms the positive of higher economic output was offset by the negatives of natural destruction or the loss of leisure time. In explaining the GPI’s rationale, the department’s website gives the example of economic expansion resulting from the “explosive growth of urban sprawl.” All that activity in construction, new sewerage systems, new roads, and new cars counts toward growth, but sprawl is also associated with several costs such as longer commutes, loss of community, destruction of natural land, as well as water and air pollution. “Just because we are exchanging money within an economy does not necessarily mean that we are sustainable or prosperous.”

The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World's Most Important Number (Bloomberg) by Liam Vaughan, Gavin Finch

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, buy low sell high, call centre, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, low interest rates, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, urban sprawl

He’d only recently upgraded from the superhero duvet he’d slept under since he was eight years old. The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World’s Most Important Number By Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch © 2017 Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch Chapter 2 Tommy Chocolate T homas Alexander William Hayes had always been an outsider. Born in 1979 and raised in the urban sprawl of Hammersmith, West London, Hayes was bright but found it hard to connect with other kids. His parents divorced when he was in primary school. When his mother Sandra remarried, she took Hayes and his younger brother Robin to live with her new husband, a management consultant, and his two children in the leafy, affluent commuter town of Winchester, bordering a stretch of bucolic countryside in the south of England.

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

Contractors don’t even need an architect on board to get funding from Caixa, the National Housing Bank – an engineer’s signature will do. And you can tell. These flimsy towers and rudimentary housing blocks have no architectural aspirations at all. For the poorest, MCMV is providing worse housing than was built at City of God in the late 1960s. History is repeating itself, and the result is yet more urban sprawl. The lessons of John Turner, PREVI and even Favela-Bairro appear not to have been learnt. The notion of conveniently located, self-built, adaptable housing has been rejected in favour of the construction industry’s profits. I spoke to a veteran of Brazilian social housing strategies, Ephim Shluger, who spent thirty years working as an architect for UNICEF and the World Bank, and he painted a very clear picture.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Back in 2000, long before Facebook, Twitter or Reddit came into existence, the sociologist Robert Putnam released his ground-breaking book Bowling Alone, in which he traced the declining participation in the voluntary associations that had historically played such an important role in building trust among citizens from all walks of life.4 Too much time in front of the television, and to a lesser extent growing commute times as a result of urban sprawl, were the main culprits in that decline, not the internet.5 And political partisanship in the US has been deepening since at least the mid-1990s when Newt Gingrich took over as House Speaker and shifted the tone of political debate.6 What the internet has done is pour fuel on the flame. By allowing people to filter what they see and with whom they interact, social media has increasingly broken down the bridges of shared experience and mutual comprehension on which the healthy functioning of society relies.

China's Superbank by Henry Sanderson, Michael Forsythe

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Carmen Reinhart, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, failed state, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, price mechanism, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, too big to fail, urban renewal, urban sprawl, work culture

An Austrian reporter on the bus hurtling southwest from the capital toward the city of Baoding was alarmed. In Vienna, these pollution levels—over 200 on the US Environmental Protection Agency particulate scale and classified as “very unhealthy”—would have sparked a national emergency, he remarked. Beijing’s urban sprawl soon gave way to farmland, with the contrast between the flawless and underused six-lane expressway and poor workers tending the land by hand a reminder of the China Development Bank (CDB)–led infrastructure boom and the imbalances it helped exacerbate. The bus was on its way to a place that offered a solution to China’s pollution woes—the global headquarters of Yingli Green Energy Holding Co.

Frommer's Egypt by Matthew Carrington

airport security, bread and circuses, centre right, colonial rule, Easter island, Internet Archive, land tenure, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, open economy, rent control, rolodex, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, Yom Kippur War

Kids The Pyramids It’s a cliché, but there’s really no sight like them. For sheer, dominating bulk, the pyramids on Giza have got pretty well everywhere else in the world beat. It used to be that you came upon them slowly, riding on horseback across the green fields that separated the plateau from the city. Nowadays, urban sprawl laps at the very feet of the Sphinx himself, and by the time you see the pyramids, they’re right on top of you. It’s a moment that you’ll never forget. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the first one you come to. The entrance is on the north face, and once inside, you face a long and uncomfortable scramble to the Great Gallery, which is some 47m (154 ft.) long and 8.5m (28 ft.) high.

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On the north coast, as with much of Egypt, you have to develop the trick of 09_259290-ch06.qxp 7/22/08 12:31 AM Page 128 Northern Egypt 0 50 mi N 0 50 km M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sidi Barrani Salum Marsa Matruh N O R T H Area of detail EGYPT Sidi abd al Rahmen 3 200 mi Q Siwa Oasis 2 El-Alamein War Cemet C Red Sea Hixj el-Qatar 0 1 Nile Cairo Zawyat Sidi Musa A T T A R A N SIO ES PR E D Qara Oasis seeing through a thick layer of urban sprawl that has taken place in the last 30 or 40 years, as well as past the decay that has accompanied it. Many miles of once pristine beach both east and west of Alexandria have been obscured by swathes of cheap concrete “holiday village” development, and the city itself has swelled from a population of 1 million in the 1960s to almost 4 times that today, with some of the growth going into new, unplanned neighborhoods and the rest being absorbed into the neglected housing of Alexandria’s old quarters.

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

The Squeeze Inn was waiting in storage on the outskirts of Perris, a town on the far side of the Santa Ana Mountains, one of the peninsular ranges that separate California’s coastal region from its harsher desert interior. Getting there meant traveling the Ortega Highway. This is one of the most dangerous roads in the state, “a place where urban sprawl, bad driving and obsolete road-building techniques collide head-on,” in the words of one Los Angeles Times reporter. The winding thoroughfare is often clogged with commuters shuttling between Orange County and the Inland Empire, but at midday, traffic was mercifully light. Before long, Linda was on the other side, driving past some of the half-dozen trailer parks that cling like barnacle colonies to the western edge of Lake Elsinore.

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You by Misha Glenny

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, BRICs, call centre, Chelsea Manning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, James Watt: steam engine, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pirate software, Potemkin village, power law, reserve currency, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Stuxnet, urban sprawl, white flight, WikiLeaks, zero day

His successful work in South Africa was noticed further up the Anglican Church’s hierarchy and, after eight years, the Bishop of Bradford in the English county of West Yorkshire urged him to consider an equally challenging post in Manningham, a residential district on the edge of Bradford city centre. The Reverend John was reluctant – England had always struck him as a rather gloomy place, with its miserable weather and urban sprawl. Equally, he knew that Manningham was no bed of roses. Many Britons regarded Bradford, and Manningham in particular, as a symbol of their country’s failing attempts to integrate its many ethnic and confessional groups. More malignant types saw in Manningham an opportunity to ratchet up the mistrust between those communities.

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink, Leif Babin

friendly fire, market design, urban sprawl

Army and Marine Corps battalions and thousands of Soldiers and Marines on the ground, were operating on the same battle map, which was crucial. But matching the numbers and street names on the map to what we were seeing in front of us on the ground could be quite a challenge. Here there were no streets signs or address numbers. This was Ramadi. Amid the urban sprawl of trash-covered streets and alleyways were huge bomb craters and walls pockmarked by bullets and spray-painted with Arabic jihadist graffiti, which our interpreters translated for us, such as: “We will fight until we reach either of the two heavens: victory or martyrdom.” We were here to ensure it was the latter.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

The Pentagon also argues that global warming might well in the long run be a more serious threat to the security of the US than terrorism.28 Interestingly, the two main culprits in the growth of carbon dioxide emissions these last few years have been the powerhouses of the global economy, the US and China (which increased its emissions by 45 per cent over the past decade). In the US, substantial progress has been made in increasing energy efficiency in industry and residential construction. The profligacy in this case largely derives from the kind of consumerism that continues to encourage high-energy-consuming suburban and ex-urban sprawl and a culture that opts to purchase gas-guzzling SUVs rather than the more energy-efficient cars that are available. Increasing US dependency on imported oil has obvious geopolitical ramifications. In the case of China, the rapidity of industrialization and of the growth of car ownership doubles the pressure on energy consumption.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

,” CNN, June 21, 2008; Richard Morrill, “The Geography of Class in Greater Seattle,” New Geography, June 16, 2009, http://www.newgeography.com/content/00857-the-geography-class-greater-seattle; interview with author. 89. Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends, “Suburbs Not Most Popular, But Suburbanites Most Content,” February 26, 2009, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2009/02/26/suburbs-not-most-popular-but-suburbanites-most-content; Jan K. Bruekner and Ann G. Largey, “Social Interaction and Urban Sprawl,” October 2006; Ed Braddy, “Smart Growth and the New Newspeak,” New Geography, April 4, 2012, http://www.newgeography.com/content/002740-smart-growth-and-the-new-newspeak; Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, “State of Metropolitan America: On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation,” report, 2010, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/Programs/Metro/state_of_metro_america/metro_america_report.pdf; Elizabeth Kneebone and Jane Williams, “New Census Data Underscore Metro Poverty’s Persistence in 2012,” Brookings, September 19, 2013, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/09/19-census-data-poverty-kneebone-williams. 90.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature by George Monbiot

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, bank run, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, dematerialisation, demographic transition, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, first-past-the-post, full employment, Gini coefficient, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, urban sprawl, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, World Values Survey

They ‘levy a toll upon all other forms of wealth and every form of industry’.14 Land value tax recoups this toll. It has a number of other benefits.15 It stops the speculative land hoarding that prevents homes from being built. It ensures that the most valuable real estate – in city centres – is developed first, discouraging urban sprawl. It prevents speculative property bubbles, of the kind that have recently trashed the economies of Ireland, Spain and other nations and which make rents and first homes so hard to afford. Because it does not affect the supply of land (they stopped making it some time ago), it cannot cause the rents that people must pay to the landlords to be raised.

The Last Job: The Bad Grandpas and the Hatton Garden Heist by Dan Bilefsky

Boris Johnson, Crossrail, Etonian, gentrification, global supply chain, license plate recognition, urban sprawl, young professional

As the two security guards were preparing to leave for the night, Reader paid his bus fare with a special travel pass for senior citizens—registered to his longtime alias, Mr. T. McCarthy—and then began an eighty-minute journey to Hatton Garden. As the 96 bus edged its way through the city, the tree-lined streets of Kent soon gave way to the capital’s urban sprawl. If Reader and the gang could pull off the caper, his children and grandchildren would never have to work again. And he would go down among the London criminal fraternity as “the Master” his contemporaries grudgingly revered. The enormity of what he and the others were about to attempt must have been flashing through his mind as the streets of London rushed by the bus’s windows.

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall by Peter Millar

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, urban sprawl, working-age population

To the inhabitants of such fringe suburbs the sudden severing of their lifelines to the city they thought they belonged to was unbelievable. Teltow was little more than a straggle of streets where the Greater Berlin that had grown up in the nineteenth century sprawled out into the countryside. On its own it was nothing, yet now, literally overnight, this little overflow of urban sprawl had been designated a rural village. It was an anomaly on a par with the ‘walled garden’ allotments I had seen from my helicopter tour when I first arrived. It was true that Pieps and his neighbours could still drive into ‘Berlin’ – at least the eastern half of it – but now it was a journey of some forty kilometres just to reach the edge of the city and when they did it was a part they were completely unfamiliar with.

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 6: THE DANISH RESPONSE this page: Information about Denmark’s environmental track record, including its level of carbon dioxide emissions since 1990, comes from figures available through the State of Green, a government-backed initiative to raise international awareness of the country’s green credentials (www.stateofgreen.com). this page: The argument for the relationship between urban population density and vibrant cities is well documented. Jane Jacobs, for one, argued convincingly against urban sprawl in her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which has influenced thoughts on urban planning since its publication in 1961. CHAPTER 7: ZERO-SUM WORLD this page: The figures for Venezuela’s oil exports to the United States come from the EIA. US oil imports from Venezuela reached a high of 1.77 million barrels a day in 1997.

A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson

Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, Ralph Waldo Emerson, urban sprawl

If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. Aldo Leopold Prologue My interest in bumblebees and other insects dates back to the age of seven, when my family and I moved from a small semi-detached house on the edge of Birmingham’s urban sprawl to a little village called Edgmond in Shropshire. My father had been brought up close by in the market town of Newport and, being a schoolteacher, he was keen that his two sons should get a good education. Newport had, and still has, a fine grammar school, the school which my father had attended and to which he hoped my brother and I would go, provided we could pass the entrance exam.

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

In 1970, when the 1954 tax loophole started to be closed, America had more than thirteen thousand shopping centers (including enclosed malls), nearly all of which had been constructed in the previous fifteen years in suburban areas, accelerating the decline of traditional downtowns. “Downtown Has Fled to the Suburbs,” noted Fortune magazine in 1972. By the 1970s Gruen had come to regret his creation, and in particular what he called “the land-wasting seas of parking” at malls, and their contribution to urban sprawl. He decided to move back to his beloved Vienna. But even there he was horrified to find, just south of the city, a “gigantic shopping machine”—a Southdale-style mall. In 1978, two years before his death, he gave a speech in London entitled “The Sad Story of Shopping Centers,” in which he formally renounced shopping malls as a perversion of his original vision: “I am often called the father of the shopping mall.

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz

biofilm, Black Lives Matter, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Graeber, Easter island, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, megacity, off-the-grid, rent control, the built environment, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

When European archaeologists first visited Angkor, they were conditioned to look for Western modes of urban development, and thus the vast majority of homes in the city remained invisible to them. They made a beeline for the stone towers of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, mistaking these temple complexes for small walled cities, instead of walled compounds within a massive urban sprawl. They completely missed the once-packed neighborhoods, reservoirs, and farms that had left their marks on the land for acres around. Everything is better with lasers It became very obvious to me how archaeologists could make that mistake when I visited Sambor Prei Kuk, once the crowded capital city of the seventh-century Chenla Empire in Cambodia.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Emerging-market megacities such as Shanghai and Mumbai are already home to some of the priciest commercial real estate in the world. In built-up areas, infrastructure can get congested easily, further raising the cost and unpredictability of doing business. Some Latin American and Asian cities are beginning to lose their power as engines of prosperity because they are clogged with traffic, scarred by urban sprawl, polluted, and crime ridden. Any visitor to Jakarta is familiar with the traffic gridlock that results from 1.5 million vehicles using roads designed for 1 million. Traffic congestion alone costs Indonesia’s capital city an estimated $1 billion a year in lost productivity.33 In Mercer’s Annual Cost of Living survey, the most expensive city for business isn’t San Francisco or Tokyo.

The Cohousing Handbook: Building a Place for Community by Chris Scotthanson, Kelly Scotthanson

Buy land – they’re not making it any more, card file, index card, intentional community, land bank, off grid, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering

. • Many alternative materials and systems cost more. Do now what you can’t do later • Detail your foundation for radon pre-mitigation. ☞ ENVIRONMENT The decision between a rural or urban location is a difficult one. If everyone chose to move out into the country and build new, what we would have would be more urban sprawl. With the sprawl we have suburbia, and the complete destruction of the natural environment. It seems to me that true environmentalists would choose to live in the high density of the city, doing their part to protect the natural environment from further development. It is possible for your community to choose an urban location, even a tiny site, or a few of fioors in a high-rise, and then buy some rural agricultural land to be owned and managed by the community.

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, business climate, Columbine, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, McMansion, mortgage debt, new economy, New Journalism, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, school vouchers, telemarketer, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

If a meaningful public school voucher system were instituted, the U.S. housing market would change forever. These changes might dampen, and perhaps even depress, housing prices in some of today’s most competitive neighborhoods. But these losses would be offset by other gains. Owners of older homes in urban centers might find more willing buyers, and the urge to flee the cities might abate. Urban sprawl might slow down as families recalculate the costs of living so far from work. At any rate, the change would cause a one-time readjustment. The housing market would normalize, with supply and demand more balanced and families freed from ruinous mortgages. The Price of Education Even with that perfect house in a swanky school district, parents still are not covered when it comes to educating their kids—not by a long shot.

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

Mark Rosenzweig described the effects of experience on brain chemistry in anatomy in a book written with Michael Renner titled Enriched and Impoverished Environments: Effects on Brain and Behavior (Springer, New York, 1987). 9Stuart Grassian has written a lengthy report on the psychiatric effects of solitary confinement for the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy (2006, Volume 22), available at: http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_journal_law_policy/vol22/iss1/24. 10Aisling Mulligan and colleagues described the influence of the home environment on the development of ADHD in an article titled “Home Environment: Association with Hyperactivity/Impulsivity in Children with ADHD and their Non-ADHD Siblings,” in the journal Child: Care, Health and Development (2013, Volume 39, pages 202–212). 11Robert Venturi and colleagues Denise Brown and Steven Izenour described the iconography of urban sprawl in Las Vegas in their controversial book Learning From Las Vegas (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1972). 12Sarah Goldhagen laments the multiple failures of architectural education in an article titled “Our Degraded Public Realm: Multiple Failures of Architecture Education,” in the January 10, 2003 issue of the Chronicle Review, available on her website (along with many other interesting articles): http://www.sarahwilliamsgoldhagen.com/articles/multiple_failures_of_architecture_education.pdf 13Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City’s Department of Transportation Commissioner, has made numerous improvements to pedestrian life in the city.

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends by Martin Lindstrom

autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, big-box store, correlation does not imply causation, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Richard Florida, rolodex, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, too big to fail, urban sprawl

The sameness of everything has a numbing effect, just as it did for the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard who, assigned to take a road trip across North America for the New York Times Magazine last year, wrote, “Ever since I landed in Cleveland the previous day, the landscape had been the same, a sort of centerless, semi-urban sprawl of highways, subdivisions, shopping malls, warehouses, gas stations and factories.”1 Nothing in the landscape, he wrote, felt surprising or natural. Concluded Knausgaard, “I was supposed to write something about this trip, and not only that, I was supposed to use this trip to grasp something essential about the United States, perceive something with my foreign gaze that Americans couldn’t see for themselves.

The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong by Barry Glassner

Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Gary Taubes, haute cuisine, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Saturday Night Live, stem cell, sugar pill, twin studies, urban sprawl, working poor

Failing to acknowledge how valuable these are for tens of thousands of families who don’t have access to safe and well-equipped playgrounds, Schlosser sees them only in a 158 The Gospel of Food marketing context, as lures to incite children to beg their parents to bring them in.30 Critics blame fast food for every modern-day ill from heart disease and cancer to crime and urban sprawl. According to an article in the Ecologist, “no corner of the Earth is safe from its presence and no aspect of life is unaffected.” Joe Kincheloe, a professor of education at Brooklyn College, actually suggests that McDonald’s is responsible for Japanese children’s losing their facility with chopsticks.31 McDonald’s engages in a “cultural pedagogy” that produces “disciplined subjects” with “colonized desires” and a “commodified identity,” Kincheloe explains in a book published by Temple University Press that is part of a large body of writing by academics who use rarefied language from social and literary theory to discuss “the McDonaldization of society,” as the title of a much discussed book put it.

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life by Pam Grout

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, Golden Gate Park, if you build it, they will come, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

“America is based on pilgrims coming over here and knocking together log cabins,” says Patrice Hennin, founder of the Shelter Institute. “Everyone, deep down in his heart, knows he can build a house. It’s not as if we’re sending rockets to the moon here; we’re just building houses.” Arcosanti. This experimental town in the high desert of Arizona offers workshops in building throughout the year that focus on eliminating urban sprawl and lessening our impact on Mother Earth. A one-week workshop, including meals and dorm- or apartment-style accommodations, is $475 and includes seminars explaining the concept of “arcology” (architecture with an eye toward ecology), tours around the alternative urban site, and a silt-casting workshop.

The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village by Gillian Tindall

gentleman farmer, gentrification, ghettoisation, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, means of production, New Urbanism, profit motive, Right to Buy, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Davenport, urban sprawl

Temperate, sunny eras have deposited elaborate fanlights, stucco mouldings, cornices and parapets; colder eras have peeled stucco and rotted trimmings, making facings porous. Successive ice ages have left piles of masonry like great rocks standing out above the more delicate roofscape of slates – piano factories, engine sheds, model dwellings, greyly serviceable blocks with stone dressings, post-War follies in roughcast concrete. In the ‘urban sprawl’ the petrified tide-marks of earlier building waves are still clearly visible: here the airy stuccoed facades give way to heavier, mid-Victorian ones with porticoes, here these in turn lie alongside late-Victorian debased Scottish baronial style. Here is an untouched segment of Edwardian red-brick and hung tile, here a slice is missing and in its place (brought hither by a glacier from a distant suburb?)

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

Or, knowing that it’s cheaper for their cars to simply drive themselves around the city than to pay for parking, car owners could let their empty vehicles roam while not in use, creating a nightmarish scenario of what Robin Chase calls “zombie cars” crowding the streets uselessly. Perhaps the suburbs will become so attractive as commutes become easier that instead of resource-efficient, high-density cities, we’ll have endless urban sprawl. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Almost everything I know about the Renaissance, the period in European history from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, comes from an eighteen-minute YouTube video produced by the author and philosophy guru Alain de Botton’s School of Life. De Botton dedicates a few minutes of the video to educating viewers about the Renaissance leaders’ zeal for building beautiful cities.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

But on the other hand the politics of cheap oil have posed problems of excessive depletion, as well as global warming and a host of other air quality issues (ground level ozone, smog, particulate matter in the atmosphere, and the like) that pose increasing risks to human populations. High-energy-consuming urban sprawl has produced chronic land use degradation conducive to flooding, the siting of waterways and the production of urban ‘heat islands’. These environmental impacts complement the depletion of the natural resources required to support an automobile industry which played such a pivotal role in capital surplus absorption from the 1930s onwards.

The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess by Turney Duff

asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, buy low sell high, collateralized debt obligation, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, proprietary trading, urban sprawl, white picket fence

“Bill’s mine,” he says as he reaches for my bags. “I got ’em,” I say. I must look weaker than I thought. Bill and I walk across the airport parking lot to a maroon van. It’s about a thirty-minute drive to the facility. I spend the first part just looking out the window at the sights, the usual just-outside-the-airport urban sprawl of highway cloverleafs and chain stores. I can’t believe I’m going to rehab. “What’s your drug of choice?” Bill asks, breaking the silence. “Cocaine and alcohol, I guess. Do you work for the rehab?” “I’m retired but I work for the center a few days a week doing whatever they need. I like to be around it.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

However, getting permission to build within cities is difficult, because existing residents are often resistant and they pressure planners. This means housing gets built in more remote areas where opposition is weaker, instead of on well-connected sites where the need is greatest, which leads to car-reliant urban sprawl, reducing the productivity and other benefits of dense cities. In England, for instance, in every region, more land is now devoted to roads than housing.5 Other restrictions, such as municipal codes across the United States that limit the number of ‘unrelated occupants’ who can live in a home,6 also need to be removed, as they can prevent low-income people from sharing homes, splitting expenses and paying lower rents.

Costa Rica by Matthew Firestone, Carolina Miranda, César G. Soriano

airport security, Berlin Wall, centre right, desegregation, illegal immigration, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the payments system, trade route, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

An unremarkable-looking hotel may have been the place where presidents once slept. It is a place rife with history. San José, after all, is where forward-thinking leaders once gathered to decide that this would be a country without an army. Over the last century, the transformation from prewar agrarian coffee town to 21st-century urban sprawl has been unkind to the city’s physical form. But regardless of what it may look like, San José is the beating heart of Costa Rica – home to its most influential thinkers, its finest museums and its most sophisticated restaurants. In a country that has been culturally transformed by vast amounts of tourism, there’s nowhere better to begin to understand what it means to be Tico.

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You can hire a taxi and a driver for half a day or longer if you want to do some touring around the area, but rates vary greatly depending on the destination and the condition of the roads. For these trips, it is best to negotiate a flat fee in advance. Return to beginning of chapter AROUND SAN JOSÉ * * * Over the years, as San José’s urban sprawl has crawled up the hillsides of the Central Valley, the boundary lines have blurred between the heart of the city and the villages that encircle it. Here you will find a little bit of everything: from crowded slums filled with immigrant workers to stylish residential neighborhoods where modernist houses hide behind 3m-high walls.

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The loop road starts 8km southeast of Cartago in Paraíso, and then heads south to Orosi. At this point you can either continue south into Parque Nacional Tapantí-Macizo Cerro de la Muerte or loop back to Paraíso via Ujarrás. Return to beginning of chapter Paraíso Area This busy town has been engulfed by the urban sprawl of Cartago, only 8km away. The village itself is not terribly picturesque (rows of concrete houses generally aren’t), but the wonderful Orosi Valley emerges just outside of it. A few kilometers along the road to Orosi is the Mirador Orosi, which is the official scenic overlook, complete with toilets, a parking lot and plenty of great photo opportunities.

Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Why Go You’ll be awed by the sweeping scenery as you meander alongside America’s longest river, from the rolling plains of the north down to the sun-baked cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. Wind-hewn bluffs, dense forests, flower-filled meadows and steamy swamps are all part of the backdrop – along with smokestacks, riverboat casinos and urban sprawl: this is the good, the bad and the ugly of life on the Mississippi. The portrait though isn’t complete without mentioning the great music, lip-smacking food and down-home welcome at towns well off the beaten path along this waterfront itinerary. Small towns provide a glimpse into varying facets of American culture: there’s Brainerd, MN, as seen in the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo; La Crosse, WI, where the world’s largest six-pack pops its top; and Nauvoo, IL, a pilgrimage site for Mormons, complete with gleaming white temple.

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Dillon’s Bus (www.dillonbus.com; tickets $5) has 26 weekday-only commuter buses between Annapolis and Washington, DC, connecting with various DC Metro lines. Annapolis Transit ( 410-263-7964) provides local transport. Inexpensive bikes (per day $5; 9am-8pm) are available for hire from the Harbormaster’s office at the City Dock. Eastern Shore Just across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a short drive from the urban sprawl of the Baltimore–Washington corridor, Maryland’s landscape makes a dramatic about-face. Nondescript suburbs and jammed highways give way to unbroken miles of bird-dotted wetlands, serene waterscapes, endless cornfields, sandy beaches and friendly little villages. The coastal flat plains are ideal for cycling.

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Kayaking and hiking are popular activities, especially the 7-mile trek to the Valley of the Giants, a mystical stand of cedar trees on South Manitou. Ferries (round-trip adult/child $32/18, 1½hr) sail from Leland two to seven times per week from May to mid-October. TRAVERSE CITY Michigan’s ‘cherry capital’ is the largest city in the northern half of the Lower Peninsula. It’s got a bit of urban sprawl, but it’s still a happenin’ base from which to see the Sleeping Bear Dunes, Mission Peninsula wineries, U-pick orchards and other area attractions. Stop at the downtown visitor center ( 231-947-1120; www.traversecity.com; 101 W Grandview Pkwy; 9am-5pm Mon-Fri, 9am-3pm Sat) for maps and the do-it-yourself foodie tour brochure (also available online; click ‘Things to Do’ on the website).

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton

Apollo 11, carbon-based life, clean water, corporate governance, disinformation, Magellanic Cloud, megacity, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, operational security, plutocrats, random walk, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, the scientific method, trade route, urban sprawl

There was also a trend toward architecture with a more elaborate or artistic profile. Sometimes it worked splendidly, as with the contemporary crystal Gothic of the Stoet Building; or else it looked downright mundane like the twisting Illeva. He didn’t actually mind the failures too much; they added to the personality of the place, so different from most of the flat urban sprawls on most of the settled worlds. Rafael Columbia was the second committee member to arrive, the chief of the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate. Nigel knew of him, of course, although the two had never met in the flesh. “Pleasure to meet you at last,” Nigel said as they shook hands. “Your name keeps cropping up on reports from our security division.”

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There was no culture to speak of on Augusta, no nationalist identity. It was devoted solely to commerce, the manufacture of products, large or small, which were shipped out across the Commonwealth. New Costa sprang up along the subtropical coast of the Sineba continent, the only city on the planet. In 2380 it was home to just over a billion people, a centerless urban sprawl of factories and residential districts stretching for more than six hundred kilometers along the shore and up to three hundred inland. For all its crass existence, the megacity had a sense of purpose upon which all its inhabitants thrived. They were here for one thing: to work. There were no native citizens, everyone was technically a transient, earning money as they passed through.

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There were no churches of any kind, but then they didn’t have any religion here, this was a world where everyone knew they had been created by man, not God. Even when the train moved through the center of the city, the buildings were all the same uniform size; neat houses interspaced by the commercial buildings, and plenty of large parks to break up the urban sprawl. It was unlike other cities in the Commonwealth, where money and political power collected at the center, and the architecture reflected that concentration. Here, equality reigned supreme. Alphaway, the main station, was probably the biggest single structure in the city after the original Foundation clinic, with three long arched roofs of iron and glass, tall enough that the clouds of smoke from the steam engines dissipated upward through the ridge vents.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Meanwhile, Sam Rawlings Walton, grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, sits on the EDF’s board of trustees (identified merely as “Boatman, Philanthropist, Entrepreneur” on the organization’s website).40 The EDF claims that it “holds Walmart to the same standards we would any other company.” Which, judging by Walmart’s rather dismal environmental record since this partnership began—from its central role in fueling urban sprawl to its steadily increasing emissions—is not a very high standard at all.41 Nor is the Environmental Defense Fund the only environmental organization to have benefited from the Walton family’s largesse. Their foundation is one of the top green funders, handing out more than $71 million in grants for environmental causes in 2011, with about half of the money going to the EDF, Conservation International, and the Marine Stewardship Council.

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., 15 Thoreau, Henry David, 184, 286 350.org, 140, 156, 233n, 353, 356 tidal power, 127 Tiger Management, 208 tight-rock formations, 311; see also shale, fracking of Tillerson, Rex, 111, 314 Time magazine, Planet Earth on cover of, 74, 204 Tiputini oil field, 410 Tjelmeland, Aaron, 192, 195 Tongue River, 389, 390 Tongue River Railroad (proposed), 389 tornados, 406 Toronto, 55, 65, 67, 73, 126 Total, 246 Totnes, England, 364 Toyota, 196 trade, see free trade agreements; international trade trade unions, 81, 83, 177, 204, 454 job creation and, 126–27 job protection by, 126, 178 NAFTA opposed by, 84 transaction tax, 418 TransCanada, 149, 346, 359, 361, 362 see also Keystone XL pipeline Transition Town movement, 364 Transocean, 330 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 78 transportation infrastructure, 85, 90, 127 travel, wealth and, 113 Treaty 6, 372 tree farms, 222 Trenberth, Kevin, 272, 275 Trent River, 300 trickle-down economics, 19 Trinity nuclear test, 277 triumphalism, 205, 465 Tropic of Chaos (Parenti), 49 tropics, techno-fixes and risk to, 49 Trump, Donald, 3 Tschakert, Petra, 269 Tsilhqot’in First Nation, 345 Tsipras, Alexis, 181–82, 466 Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, 323 Tutu, Desmond, 464 Tuvalu, 13 2 degrees Celsius boundary, 87–88, 89, 150, 354, 456 Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, 13, 21, 56, 86–87, 214, 283 typhoons, 107, 175, 406, 465 Uganda, 222 ultra-deepwater “subsalt” drilling, 145 Undesirables (Isaacs), 167 unemployment, 180 unemployment insurance, 454 Unified Campesino Movement of Aguán, 222 Union of Concerned Scientists, 201 Clean Vehicles Program at, 237 United Kingdom, 13, 149, 170, 224, 225 compensation of slave-owners in, 415–16, 457 “dash for cash” in, 299 divestment movement in, 354 flooding in, 7, 54, 106–7 fracking in, 299–300, 313 Industrial Revolution in, 172–73, 410 negatives of privatization in, 128 politics of climate change in, 36, 150 supports for renewable energy cut in, 110 Thatcher government of, 39 World War II rationing in, 115–16 United Nations, 7, 18, 64, 87, 114 Bloomberg as special envoy for cities and climate change of, 236 Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), 219–20, 224, 226 climate governance and, 280 climate summits of, 5, 11, 65, 150, 165, 200; see also specific summits Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 110 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) international agreements and, 17 Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, 135 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment of 1972, 202 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 377, 383 United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 180 United Nations Environmental Modification Convention, 278 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 272 United Nations Framework on Climate Change, 200, 410 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 76, 77, 78–79 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 167 United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992), 55, 293 United Policyholders, 109 United States, 19, 67, 68, 143 carbon emissions from, 409 coal exports from, 320, 322, 346, 349, 374, 376 Copenhagen agreement signed by, 12, 150 energy privatization reversals in, 98 environmental legislation in, 201–2 failure of climate legislation in, 226–27 Kyoto Protocol and, 218–19, 225–26 oil and gas export restrictions in, 71 opposition movement in, 9 solar energy market in, 72 WTO challenges brought against, 65 WTO challenges brought by, 64–65, 68 United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), 226–28 University College London, 415–16 uranium, 176 urban planning, green, 16 urban sprawl, 90, 91 US Airways, 1–2 U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 227 utilities, alternative models for, 130–33 U’wa, 376–77 Vagt, Robert F., 217 van Beurden, Ben, 358, 376 Vancouver, Canada, 13 Var, France, 317–18 Vassiliou, Anni, 347 vegetation, carbon and, 14 Venezuela, 179–80 Venkataraman, R., 75 venture capitalists, 252 Vermont: anti-fracking movement in, 348 local agriculture in, 404–5 Vernon, Caitlyn, 365 victory gardens, 16, 17 Vidal, John, 244 Vietnam War, 261 Virgin Earth Challenge, 257, 284–85 Virgin Green Fund, 238, 239, 253 Virgin Group, 230, 237 Virgin Airlines, 231, 238, 241–44, 249–52 Virgin Fuels, 238 Virgin Racing, 243 Virgin Trains, 231, 238, 252–53 Viteri, Franco, 388 volcanic eruptions: droughts and, 272–73 global impact of, 274 weather patterns and, 259, 270, 271–74 Volney, Constantin-François, 273 Vonnegut, Kurt, 286, 287 Vowel, Chelsea, 371 Voynet, Dominique, 218 wage controls, 125 Wallach, Lori, 359–60 Wall Street, 206, 208 in financial crisis of 2008, 9, 44 Wall Street Journal, 207, 312 Walmart, 196, 208–10 Walton, Sam, 209 Walton, Sam Rawlings, 209 Walton Family Foundation, 209 Wang Wenlin, 300 Wania, Frank, 328n Ward, Barbara, 286 Warsaw climate change summit (2013), 200–201, 276 Washington, D.C.: Keystone XL protest in, 139, 301–2 record temperatures in, 73 Washington Consensus, 81 Washington State, 319 Indigenous land rights in, 323, 374–75, 380–81 proposed coal export terminals in, 320, 322, 346, 349, 374, 380–81 Washington, Tracie, 419 water: disruption to supplies of, 14, 165 First Nations and, 384 privatization of, 133 as public utility, 7 water pollution: extractive industry and, 83, 94, 295, 296, 332, 344–47 from fracking, 328–29, 332, 344, 346 water power, 16, 101, 215 of factories, 171 steam engine vs., 171–72 Waters, Donny, 431, 432 Watt, James, 171–75, 204, 266, 394, 410 Waxman-Markey, 227 wealth: concentration of, 154, 155 decentralization of, 131 greenhouse gas emissions and, 113–14 inequality of, 123, 454–55 redistribution of, 40, 42, 453 transfers of, 5 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 173, 462 weapons, climate change and, 9 weather, extreme, 35, 102–10 weather futures, 8–9 weatherization, 93 weather patterns: global warming and, 269 historical record of, 271–76 Pinatubo eruption and, 259, 270, 271–72, 274 variations in, 269 weather patterns, intentional modification of: as weapon, 261, 278 see also Pinatubo Option; Solar Radiation Management Weintrobe, Sally, 12 Werner, Brad, 449–50, 451, 460 West Antarctic ice sheet, 13, 14, 15 West Burton, England, 300 Western Australia, 376 West, Thomas, 365 West Virginia, 332, 357n, 367 wetlands, extractive industry damage to, 425–26 Weyerhaeuser, 369 Where Do We Go from Here (King), 453 Whitehead, Andrew, 432 Whitehorn, Will, 230–31 Whitehouse, Mark, 428 Whiteman, Phillip, Jr., 386 Whole Earth Catalogue, 288 WikiLeaks, 78, 165 wilderness system, federal, 203 wildfires, 14, 52, 108, 446 Wildlife Conservation Society, 221–22 Wildlife Society, 192 Willemse, Oom Johannes, 347 Willett Advisors, 216, 235 Williams, Eric, 415 Willis, Rebecca, 90 wind farms, 110, 223, 287 “Window for Thermal Coal Investment Is Closing” (Goldman Sachs), 352 wind power, 16, 67, 70, 97, 102, 118, 122, 124, 127, 131–32, 147, 215, 237 in combined-cycle plant, 129 fracking’s negative impact on, 129, 144n large offshore, 131 manufacturers in, 68 private sector and, 100–101 Wood, Lowell, 268n, 271, 280, 288 Woolsey, R.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

British Empire, delayed gratification, European colonialism, lateral thinking, microplastics / micro fibres, neurotypical, urban sprawl, wage slave

He pauses, wipes the sweat off his face, drinks half of his bottle of water. He hopes there will be more somewhere, soon. Up ahead, the houses thin out and vanish. There’s an interval of parking lots and warehouses, then barbed wire strung between cement posts, an elaborate gate off its hinges. End of urban sprawl and pleeb city limits, beginning of Compound turfdom. Here’s the last station of the sealed-tunnel bullet train, with its plastic jungle-gym colours. No risks here, the colours are saying. Just kiddie fun. But this is the dangerous part. Up to here he’s always had something he could climb or scramble up or dodge around in case of a flank attack, but now comes an open space with no shelter and few verticals.

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan

autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, megaproject, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, self-driving car, sharing economy, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

$69 billion in highway spending: Ibid., 17. only about half: Ibid., 6. 10 percent from municipal bonds: Ibid., 8. pays more than $1,100: Ibid., 2. transit, walking, and biking combined: Ibid. $1 trillion a year drag: Todd Litman, An Analysis of Public Policies That Unintentionally Encourage and Subsidize Urban Sprawl (Victoria, BC, Canada: Victoria Transport Policy Institute, LSE Cities, 2015), 40, accessed August 5, 2014, http://static.newclimateeconomy.report/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/public-policies-encourage-sprawl-nce-report.pdf. nearly 33,000 people can lose their lives: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “U.S.

The politics of London: governing an ungovernable city by Tony Travers

active transport: walking or cycling, bread and circuses, congestion charging, Crossrail, first-past-the-post, full employment, job satisfaction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, post-Fordism, radical decentralization, urban sprawl, vertical integration

About a third of workplaces have their main market elsewhere in the UK, and a small but sizeable proportion of workplaces rely mainly on international markets (London TEC Council, 1998). Three quarters of workplaces in London employ ten people or fewer, but a third of all jobs are provided by large workplaces (more than 200 employees). Within Britain, and particularly in southern England, concern has developed about the problems of urban sprawl. Although London has been hemmed in since 1939 by a highly effective Green Belt, the prosperity of the southern part of the country has led to major and continuous development in virtually all of the counties surrounding London. Towns such as Reading, Bracknell, Crawley and Watford have been subjected to enormous planning pressure for many years.

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, financial independence, game design, Garrett Hardin, geopolitical risk, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, means of production, new economy, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review

But for several decades the output of the industry and service sectors remains sufficiently high to maintain acceptable living standards, despite the need for capital investment in agriculture and, later, for pollution control. In the last third of the twenty-first century, the pollution level has fallen so much that land fertility recovers. But the population pressure is large, and the amount of arable land declines due to urban sprawl and erosion. Furthermore, after the middle of the century industrial output falls rapidly, because so much capital has been pulled into the agricultural and pollution sectors that there is no longer enough investment to offset depreciation. The economy declines, and a collapse sets in, exacerbated late in the century by an increasing scarcity of nonrenewable resources.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Many of these slums would ultimately be cleared forcefully by the police and the residents dumped in far-flung neighbourhoods, with even worse sanitation and poorer road access, to make way for new apartment blocks for the ever-growing middle class. If the poor could not get out of the new slums fast enough (though getting out of the slums was at least possible, given the rapid growth of the economy and the creation of new jobs), the urban sprawl would catch up with them and see them rounded up once again and dumped in an even more remote place. Some people ended up scavenging in the city’s main rubbish dump, Nanji Island. Few people outside Korea were aware that the beautiful public parks surrounding the impressive Seoul Football Stadium they saw during the 2002 World Cup were built literally on top of the old rubbish dump on the island (which nowadays has an ultra-modern eco-friendly methane-burning power station, which taps into the organic material dumped there).

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

It may not be quite game-ending, but it seems set, at the very least, to utterly change the board on which the game is played, and in more profound ways than almost anyone now imagines. The habitable planet has literally begun to shrink, a novel development that will be the great story of our century. * * * Climate change has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it—it’s part of our mental furniture, like urban sprawl or gun violence. So, let’s remember exactly what we’ve been up to, because it should fill us with awe; it’s by far the biggest thing humans have ever done. Those of us in the fossil fuel–consuming classes have, over the last two hundred years, dug up immense quantities of coal and gas and oil, and burned them: in car motors, basement furnaces, power plants, steel mills.

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Many of these slums would ultimately be cleared forcefully by the police and the residents dumped in far-flung neighbourhoods, with even worse sanitation and poorer road access, to make way for new apartment blocks for the ever-growing middle class. If the poor could not get out of the new slums fast enough (but getting out of the slums was at least possible, given the rapid growth of the economy and the creation of new jobs), the urban sprawl would catch up with them and see them rounded up once again and dumped in an even more remote place. Some people ended up scavenging in the city’s main rubbish dump, Nanji Island. Few people outside Korea were aware that the beautiful public parks surrounding the impressive Seoul Football Stadium they saw during the 2002 World Cup were built literally on top of the old rubbish dump on the island (which nowadays has an ultra-modern eco-friendly methane-burning power station, which taps into the organic material dumped there).

The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Batsford’s Face of Britain series was phenomenally successful. Arthur Mee, inventor of the Children’s Encyclopaedia and the Children’s Newspaper, produced forty-one volumes describing The King’s England. The Shell Oil company invited John Betjeman to edit its series of Shell Guides to the counties of England. Recognizing the way that urban sprawl was gorging upon the countryside, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England was founded in 1926 to protest against the spread of tar. Putting footwear upon this interest, the Ramblers Association was established in 1935, a crusade to allow urban walkers to stroll where they pleased across the countryside.

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher

Bletchley Park, centre right, colonial rule, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Scramble for Africa, trade route, urban sprawl, éminence grise

Travellers in the early twentieth century knew from afar when they were approaching the city from the sight of the great fortress built on the high rocky promontory that towers over the junction of the Sava and Danube Rivers. It would have been visible from miles away, dominating unchallenged what was otherwise a classic central-European flatland of forest, field and marsh. The urban sprawl of modern Belgrade, with its ranks of electricity pylons, tower blocks and red-and-white-chequered factory chimneys, rather diffused the sense of drama when my last lift dropped me in the city. But soon enough I was back on the trail of my quarry, as the road I found myself walking up near Belgrade’s railway station was named Gavrilo Princip Street.

Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application