walkable city

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pages: 342 words: 86,256

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

(Koolhaas) “Where the Neon Lights Are Bright—and Drivers Are No Longer Welcome” (Summers) “White Men’s Roads Through Black Men’s Homes” Slogan Whitman, Walt Whyte, William Williams, Robin Wilson, Charles Erwin Wolverine World Wide World War I Wynkoop Brewing Company Yale University Yamasaki, Minoru Yelp website Young, Brigham Zeilinski, Susan Zipcar zoning; inclusionary Zynga ALSO BY JEFF SPECK Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (coauthor with Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk) The Smart Growth Manual (coauthor with Andres Duany) PRAISE FOR WALKABLE CITY “Brilliant and companionable … Walkable City is at once entertaining and enraging, its pages dotted with jaw-dropping statistics.” —Carlin Rosengarten, The Post and Courier (Charleston, S.C.) “Cities are the future of the human race, and Jeff Speck knows how to make them work.” —David Owen, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Green Metropolis “It’s time to add a new name to the roll call of the city gang[,] Jeff Speck … It turns out to be exactly the right time for a down-and-dirty, step-by-step seminar on city repair—especially one conducted by as genial a presenter as Speck.”

” —Taras Grescoe, The Globe and Mail (Toronto) “Walkable City is an eloquent ode to the livable city and to the values behind it.” —Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic and author of Why Architecture Matters “Jeff Speck is one of the few practitioners and writers in the field who can make a 312-page book on a basic planning concept seem too short … For getting planning ideas into the thinking and the daily life of U.S. cities, this is the book.” —Planning magazine “If you’re a professional planner or advocate, Walkable City is a new, essential reference. If you’re new to the subject, there’s no better introduction.”

Walking, the Urban Advantage Why Johnny Can’t Walk The Wrong Color Green II: THE TEN STEPS OF WALKABILITY The Useful Walk Step 1: Put Cars in Their Place Step 2: Mix the Uses Step 3: Get the Parking Right Step 4: Let Transit Work The Safe Walk Step 5: Protect the Pedestrian Step 6: Welcome Bikes The Comfortable Walk Step 7: Shape the Spaces Step 8: Plant Trees The Interesting Walk Step 9: Make Friendly and Unique Faces Step 10: Pick Your Winners Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Geographic Index General Index Also by Jeff Speck Praise for Walkable City Copyright PROLOGUE This is not the next great book on American cities. That book is not needed. An intellectual revolution is no longer necessary. What characterizes the discussion on cities these days is not a wrongheadedness or a lack of awareness about what needs to be done, but rather a complete disconnect between that awareness and the actions of those responsible for the physical form of our communities.


Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn, Robert McLean

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deep learning, Donald Trump, driverless car, drop ship, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fail fast, fake news, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Hyperloop, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, iterative process, loss aversion, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, nudge unit, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, pets.com, prediction markets, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart contracts, stem cell, sunk-cost fallacy, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, WikiLeaks

This example is just a simple one to show how regression analysis can help you begin to understand the drivers of your problem, and perhaps to craft strategies for positive intervention at the city level. As useful as regression is in exploring our understanding, there are some pitfalls to consider: Be careful with correlation and causation. Walkable cities seem to almost always have far lower obesity rates than less walkable cities. However, we have no way of knowing from statistics alone whether city walkability is the true cause of lower obesity. Perhaps walkable cities are more expensive to live in and the real driver is higher socioeconomic status. Or perhaps healthier people move to more walkable communities. Regression models can be misleading if there are variables that we may not have accounted for in our model but that may be very important.

There are lots of advantages to this—in particular, your competitors are sure not to have your data. Let's take a look at two types of experiments that have become popular in the corporate world. Randomized controlled experiments allow us to test a change in one variable while controlling for all other variables. As we saw in the obesity example above, maybe it's not a feature of walkable cities themselves that makes people less obese. Maybe people who are already healthy tend to move to cities that are walkable because they like to walk. Experiments avoid this kind of potential mistake in understanding causality. But they're often hard to execute in practice. We can't easily make a city more pedestrian friendly and compare it to another city.

She recommends specific strategies for providing nutrition advice to parents, promoting breastfeeding for the first 12 months, and having a monthly visit to a doctor to monitor weight gain.8 There may be extraordinary leverage that can come from simple, straightforward actions to address the issue of child obesity and its knock‐on effects. 5. Walkability or Active Transport. Cities like New York or Tokyo are good examples of walkable cities. We decided to look at walkability in 68 US cities: it is a statistically significant variable in explaining obesity differences. The relationship is that a 10% increase in walkability reduces obesity by 0.3%. For the UK, this would have impact similar to a 10% tax on high‐sugar, high‐fat products.


pages: 83 words: 23,805

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

This collaboration will weave an intelligence into the urban experience that improves life in remarkable ways. The city will be not only smarter but also better. 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.

This is due partly to diet but partly to planning: The methodical eradication from our communities of the useful walk — daily destinations reachable on foot — has helped to create the least-active generation in American history. This insult is compounded by the very real injuries that result from car crashes — the greatest killer of children and young adults nationwide — as well as an asthma epidemic tied directly to vehicle exhaust. Comparison of walkable cities versus auto-dependent suburbs yields some eye-opening statistics; for example, transit users are more than three times as likely as drivers to achieve their CDC-recommended 30 minutes of daily physical activity.1 Increasingly, it is becoming clear that the American health care crisis is largely an urban design crisis, with walkability at the heart of the cure.

He’s a former staff writer at the Atlantic Cities, and his work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Wired, Discover, Fast Company, and Domus. Find more of his work at nate-berg.com. Jeff Speck, former director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts, is a city planner based in Washington, D.C. His book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, was published in 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. John Metcalfe is a staff writer at the Atlantic Cities who lives in San Francisco. He has written for the New York Times, Seattle Weekly, and Washington City Paper. Before taking on his current urban-affairs beat, he covered weather and climate change for a Virginia TV station.


pages: 242 words: 71,943

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

That the change has come at such a great cost to our financial health and prosperity only makes it more disturbing. Financial realities demand that we make our cities more walkable, but it seems more than possible that this act will also make our lives better in unpredictable ways. As Speck suggests in Walkable City: We must understand that the walkable city is not just a nice, idealistic notion. Rather, it is a simple, practical-minded solution to a host of complex problems that we face as a society, problems that daily undermine our nation’s economic competitiveness, public welfare, and environmental sustainability.2 In fairly simple and straightforward ways, we can improve the financial health of our cities while improving people’s lives.

And as a professional running my own organization, I also have job security. If I decide I’m working from home to avoid nasty weather, there are no negative ramifications. For my neighbors that work multiple part-time jobs at or near minimum wage – and I’ve now met many of them – even being late has ramifications. Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, describes a good walk as one that is “useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting.” As I ponder how these four elements in what Jeff calls his “General Theory of Walkability” apply to my town, I recognize how despotic for people not in an automobile we have made this formerly walkable place.

Working together in an intentional way, it is possible to make our places stronger financially while also improving the lives of people. That is the essence of a Strong Towns approach, the bottom-up revolution America desperately needs. Notes 1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5278644/. 2 Jeff Speck, Walkable City (New York: North Point Press, 2012). 3 Bill Bishop, The Big Sort (New York: Mariner Books, 2009). 4 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 2012). 5 Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). 6 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 2012). 7 Sebastian Junger, Tribe (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2016). 8 Ibid.


pages: 441 words: 96,534

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

The waterfront road along the Hudson River, the site of the former West Side Highway near where I lived, was a jumble of dilapidated piers and parking lots, and the way there was littered with broken glass and crack vials. There was little attention given to the way the streets looked or felt. New Yorkers were desperately hanging on, trying to survive, not thinking about how these streets—the greatest asset in one of the world’s most walkable cities—could be used. Even then I was certain New York’s streets had more to offer. I came to the job of commissioner twenty-six years after Robert Moses’s death in a city that Moses might still have recognized. Moses saw in New York a city struggling to modernize and weighed down by its past. And more than anyone before or since, Moses had the means, the power, and the motivation to do something about it.

Whether neighborhood sidewalks or commercial corridors like Fordham Road in the Bronx, Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, Victory Boulevard on Staten Island, Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, or the warren of narrow streets in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Little Italy—these in-between places are a stage for New Yorkers, the urban filament where people sense and connect to the city’s energy. In walkable cities, sidewalk design can encourage walking by creating opportunities for things to do and see along the way. This could be shopping, eating, or clustering services in a particular area, which can enhance connectivity and eliminate the need for cars to run multiple errands. And sidewalk life isn’t just about movement.

Many people see their private vehicles as a means of liberation, but the less romantic counterpart to our Jack Kerouac fantasy is that cars sit idle upwards of 95 percent of the time and don’t disappear when not actively used. They require real estate. And whether totally free or metered at far below market rates, city parking consumes as much real estate in many cities as sidewalks or parkland. “Parking covers more acres of urban America than any other one thing,” Jeff Speck writes in Walkable City, referring to a study that found 500 million parking spaces are empty in the nation at any given moment. Huge swaths of city centers in places like Buffalo, Detroit, Hartford, Tulsa, and St. Louis have as much, if not more, acreage turned over to parking lots than to human activity. In many cities, private parking itself is a countervailing force to development, with parking “craters”—massive tracts of open-air parking lots in downtown areas—sucking away density, eroding the streetscape, and making urban centers feel as lifeless as, well, an empty parking lot.


pages: 366 words: 110,374

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Easter island, European colonialism, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Kibera, low cost airline, megacity, off-the-grid, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, spice trade, tech bro, trade route, walkable city, women in the workforce

If you’re far from a taxi rank, you’ll need to call for a car (or have an Italian do it for you); in this case, be advised that the meter starts when the driver accepts the ride, not when you enter the vehicle. A typical ride will cost between 6 and 20 euros/US$7–$22, and a 5 to 10 percent tip for good service is appreciated. And of course, in most weather, Rome is a gloriously walkable city, with plenty to see and eat along the way to your destination. SLEEPING IN ROME * * * “I suggest the Centro Storico or historical center in the city, so you’re within walking distance of all the good stuff that you want to at least lay eyes on. Hotels are expensive, so book early if you’re shooting for lower-price pensiones, as they tend to fill up quickly.”

It is located about six miles south of Oaxaca’s historic center; a private cab ride takes twenty to thirty minutes and will cost 150 pesos/about US$7.50; a shared airport van is 48 pesos/US$2.50; for either choice, buy a ticket inside the terminal and tip 10 pesos for good service. Oaxaca is a pleasantly walkable city, with lots to see (and eat) along the way. For longer distances, hail a standard taxi or ask your hotel to call one for you. Not all drivers use the meter, so ask that your driver turn it on, or agree on a rate up front. Oaxaca has a few bus routes, but the buses are privately owned, and information about schedules, routes, and fares can be difficult to come by.

Single fares are calculated based on route and distance, starting at about SG$0.75/about US$0.50 and topping out around SG$3/about US$2.15. One-, two-, and three-day unlimited cards are available for tourists. SMRT also administers the city-state’s bus service and even its taxis; a taxi ride from airport to hotel should take about thirty minutes, and cost about SG$30/US$22. Singapore is also, in theory, a walkable city, though the average temperature is 88°F and it rains about ten days out of every month, so, as they say, your mileage may vary. And finally, a word to the wise. “Despite all my trips here, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cop, but know this: when they say, ‘No drugs in Singapore,’ they are not kidding, and I mean really, really not kidding.


pages: 278 words: 91,332

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

It is also that when people can get around without a car, so much land is not needed for parking, and more homes can fit on a given patch of land. The less land is needed for parking, the more useful the stuff that can be squeezed onto it. That is why the most valuable real estate in the world is all in cities with good public transport. So why do more governments not invest in more walkable cities with public transport, given the returns? Well, here is the prisoner’s dilemma. Public transport requires collective decision making. Building a new railway only works if there are already people there to use it. But if people have already moved to a city without public transport, they will probably already have bought cars and moved to homes they can only access with cars.

Instead, each building is turned into a standalone entity, which people drive to and then drive away from without ever interacting with any of the other businesses nearby. Such places have less vibrancy; they are less cool. They are, I would also say, much uglier. There is a reason relatively few young people aspire to move to Dallas, whereas millions grow up wanting to live in New York, Paris, or Berlin. In a walkable city, a supermarket on a commercial street also supports barber shops, cafes, pubs, and so on, because people combine their trips and visit several businesses at once. That does not happen when you have to drive between each one. Ironically, that is why businessmen invented the shopping mall, and the strip mall—so that people can re-create the experience of shopping in lots of different places after parking once.

“There’s a demographic of young people who have the potential to pay a million [Canadian dollars], not in cash, but with a mortgage, even to C$1.3 million, and you’d take us as a group of customers and you push us to the suburbs,” she told me. That is why it is so damaging that so much new construction happens in sprawling, car-dependent places. We are missing a massive opportunity to give people lives they would like—lives that happen to be far more sustainable, as well as more pleasant—in walkable cities, and instead pushing them out to places that are developed entirely around the automobile. Each year the Houston metropolitan area, with a population of seven million, adds 70,000 new homes, almost all of them in the suburbs, while Dallas adds 60,000. The New York metropolitan area, by contrast, with a population three times higher, covering much of Long Island and New Jersey as well as the city, manages only 54,000.


pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Within a year, it was stolen off the streets of Bensonhurst and I was reduced to riding a bike: in 1969, the opposite of cool. My stupidity, by the way, wasn’t limited to making trade-in decisions. My embrace of driving—while I had a car to drive, that is—was contributing to the demise of something smart—walkable city streets—though I didn’t realize it for years. I did attend classes, too. In New York State high schools, students take standardized tests, known as Regents Exams, in a variety of subjects, and at Brooklyn Tech I had scored the highest grade in the school on the physics exam. I wasn’t particularly interested in physics, but I thought it was my calling, so when the time came to choose a major, physics was it.

And, since they were the demographic cohort most likely to drive as adults—way more than city kids, anyway—their defection counted twice, the same way that a second-place team’s victory over the team they’re chasing adds a half game to the team behind and takes a half game away from the team ahead. By moving not to another suburb but to a walkable city, a suburban young adult electing not to drive isn’t quite a “man bites dog” newsflash, but it is certainly a snap at what had been a routine rite of passage since the end of World War II. After fifty years of mistaken decisions about America’s built environment, a lot of Millennials are looking for something different.

e Actually, everyone likes the sound of that kind of place. Though the percentages are highest among the young, more than half of forty- and fifty-year-olds reported a preference for living in mixed-use communities. f One consequence is that supply and demand are increasingly out of whack in desirable—that is, walkable—cities and neighborhoods. This leads inevitably to higher housing costs, and more and more stratification among Millennials: as prices get bid up, fewer and fewer low-earning families stay, which leads to a self-reinforcing cycle. Prices that go up tend to keep going up. One perverse result is that the highest-earning families end up with the lowest transportation costs.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

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

., ‘Applicability of Bogotá’s Transmilenio BRT System to the United States’, National Bus Rapid Transit Institute, May 2006, pp. 41–2. 17. www.pps.org/articles/epenalosa-2 18. Thompson, C., ‘Why New Yorkers Last Longer’, 13 August 2007, nymag.com/news/features/35815/index1.html 19. www.walkonomics.com/blog/2011/04/getting-our-obese-cities-walking-again 20. Florida, R., ‘America’s Most Walkable Cities’, 10 December 2010, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/12/americas-most-walkable-cities/67988/ 21. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7590210/Expressway-roads-along-Seine-to-be-closed-after-40-years.html 22. www.preservenet.com/freeways/FreewaysPompidou.html 23. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/02/paris-seine-riverside-expressway-pedestrian Chapter 10: How Many Lightbulbs Does It Take To Change A City?

Between 2000 and 2009, the average vehicle miles travelled by this age group dropped by 23 per cent, and the number of young people who do not have driver’s licences has risen to 26 per cent.4 With improvements in bike lanes as well as public transport, more people are leaving their cars at home, or even at the dealership, when they travel into the city. In addition, as the promotion of more walkable cities gains momentum, they are also preferring to use the pavements, thus adding to the ballet of the streets. But this is not enough. Despite the advantages of urban living, we are still using too much energy, spewing out an unsustainable level of carbon emissions. We are producing too much waste, our cities create ‘heat islands’ that raise the atmospheric temperature, the materials – bricks, steel, plastic, glass – we use to build our houses and our streets are inefficient.


pages: 282 words: 69,481

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

In my own work and in this book, I apply my own materialist understanding of what tools are effective—and therefore called for—to land use and human behavior. And despite a major theme of the book—that transportation drives (or deter-mines) land use—I am a professional planning practitioner. Therefore I elaborate more thoroughly the details of urban design than the details of transportation engineering. I love healthy, walkable cities—their energy, vitality, and rich diversity. I wrote this book in large part because I have seen the equivalent of too many monuments like my neighborhood street marker toppled, and because I fear that we are allowing cars to destroy the joys of the traditional city by dissipating their energy, sapping their vitality, and homogenizing their fascinating diversity.If we are to have the full use of automobiles, cities must be remade.

Buildings that have only a rear or side entrance (usually, an entrance oriented toward a parking lot) not only make travel highly inconvenient for pedestrians and public transit users but also cut the building off from street life—the building turns its back on the public and reduces urban vibrancy.36 As walkers in a walkable city, we want not only convenient, welcoming entrances on the sidewalk but also windows. What is more boring, deadly, and impersonal than a long expanse of blank wall? Homogenized, banal “icon architecture“ (also known as “cookie cutter” or “franchise” architecture), which immediately conveys a corporate image to the passerby—McDonald’s golden arches, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s red-and-white stripes—diminishes a city’s unique identity and creates what Jim Kunstler calls the “geography of nowhere.”37 A WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING We should be on guard not to allow projects touted as New Urbanist that deliver New Urbanism‘s principles only in a skin-deep way, such as those that perpetuate car dependence, or that fail to provide a mix of housing affordability, even if the houses have front porches or other forms of window dressing.


pages: 296 words: 76,284

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

When the buildings or houses that line the street are set far back and spaced wide apart, it creates an atmosphere of more open road—less “lateral friction,” in transportation engineerspeak—which encourages speed; when buildings or homes are built closer to the road and closer to one another, it creates a sense of “spatial enclosure” and encourages drivers to go slower. “The wider the street and the less lateral friction a motorist has, the faster a motorist is going to go,” says Dumbaugh. Jeff Speck, a renowned city planner and author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, puts it another way: “Most motorists drive the speed at which they feel comfortable, which is the speed to which the road has been engineered.” Some of the most dangerous roads in all of suburbia are the arterial roads, the faster-moving commercial thoroughfares that connect suburbs to one another.

Norton, 2011); John Pulcher, “Public Transportation,” in Susan Hanson and Genevieve Giuliano, The Geography of Urban Transportation, 3rd ed. (Guilford Press, 2004). We have the highest per capita: World Bank statistics. One study found a nearly 500 percent: Peter Swift, “Residential Street Typology and Injury Accident Frequency,” June 1997; updated 2002, 2006. Jeff Speck, a renowned city planner: Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 172. Specifically, Dumbaugh found: Eric Dumbaugh and Robert Rae, “Safe Urban Form: Revisiting the Relationship Between Community Design and Traffic Safety,” Journal of the American Planning Association 75, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 309–29.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

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

Sprawl’s big bang came in the late ‘50s, when construction of Phoenix’s first federally funded freeway began, and the IRS allowed homeowners to include central air-conditioning in their home mortgages. (These days, summertime cooling bills for a three-bedroom house can easily top $500 a month.) In a single year, 1959, more houses were built than in the three decades before the end of the Second World War. As late as 1940, Phoenix was a walkable city covering a mere 17 square miles; it even had a small, but popular, streetcar network. After half a century of freeway building and rampant growth, Phoenix is the sixth-most-populous city in the United States. Its metropolitan area, which includes Scottsdale, Tempe, and Mesa, has a population of 4.3 million and covers 17,000 square miles—making it larger than the entire nation of Switzerland.

On its own, transportation, even coupled with the most up-to-date urbanism, is never going to be enough to revive a place whose economy is in the doldrums. If there are no jobs for people to get to, the most advanced bus rapid transit and light rail in the world will be useless. But transit is going to be a crucial ingredient in the coming urban renaissance. In an era of rising energy prices, when people are realizing that livable, walkable city neighborhoods make for attractive places to raise families, cities like Philadelphia, with their legacy of good transit and excellent urban structure, will be well placed to thrive. The First City may never attain the international stature of a New York, Shanghai, or London, but my guess is that, pretty soon, Philadelphia will be one great place to live.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009. Rome, Adam. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environ-mentalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Smith, P.D. City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Soderstrom, Mary. The Walkable City: From Haussmann’s Boulevards to Jane Jacobs’ Streets and Beyond. Montreal: Véhicule, 2008. Acknowledgments Every book is a voyage, but this one felt like a three-year train trip—on good days by bullet train, but more often by sparking, backsliding, Toonerville trolley. Fortunately, there were people at every station stop to show me the right track; without them, I never would have made it home.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

As Danish architect Jan Gehl put it, all the key objectives of city planning—lively cities, safety, sustainability, and health—are strengthened by encouraging more people to walk and bike and fewer to drive. “We are more innovative and more productive in a walkable urban environment,” said Christopher Leinberger, an urbanist academic and real estate developer and author of The Option of Urbanism, who lives in Washington, DC. Walkable cities and the walkable areas in cities are more valuable investments than car-centered suburban areas. They create more economic growth, and the real estate grows in value faster there than in the burbs. “The money is made in walkable urban places now. We overbuilt drivable suburban places.” What was the secret to it?

“It’s all about proximity to people,” Leinberger said. The denser a city is, the more walkable and pedestrian and bicycle friendly it becomes, the more people are able to connect with other people, exchange ideas face-to-face, form relationships, and spur innovation and growth. That exchange of ideas is the reason walkable cities have always existed and remain the city’s best future. The suburban car city of the past half century was an aberration—a wrong exit in the city’s evolution. “It’s no different than Jericho, the world’s first city, eight thousand years ago,” he said. “It’s the same mechanism.” The transformation over the past decades that returned cities to more walkable, livable places was decidedly analog.


Pocket Stockholm Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, cashless society, Kickstarter, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, urban decay, walkable city

Contents QuickStart Guide Welcome to Stockholm Top Sights Local Life Day Planner Need to Know Stockholm Neighbourhoods Explore Gamla Stan Norrmalm Djurgarden & Skeppsholmen Sodermalm Ostermalm Millesgarden Museums of Gardet & Ladugardsgardet Kungsholmen Drottningholm Vasastan Stockholm Archipelago Best The Best of Stockholm Gamla Stan & Around Water's Edge Walk Eating Cafes Museums & Galleries Nightlife Live Music Shopping Fashion Design With Kids For Free LGBT Architecture Parks Festivals & Events Survival Guide Survival Guide Before You Go Arriving in Stockholm Getting Around Essential Information Language Behind the Scenes Our Writers Welcome to Stockholm Stockholmers call their compact, walkable city 'Beauty on Water'. But despite the gorgeous old town centre, Gamla Stan, Stockholm is no museum piece: it's modern, dynamic and ever-changing. This is a city of food obsessives, with good design a given across all aspects of daily life: if something can be beautiful as well as functional, why not make it so?


pages: 413 words: 115,274

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

There were only so many American neighborhoods that even had the bones to support a car-free life; those were exactly the neighborhoods where rents were highest, and many barely permitted new housing at all. Parking minimums were not the only thing standing between the status quo and the revival of vibrant, walkable cities. For a builder, excising even surplus parking was tough. Parking may have been expensive and underused, and the curb right there for the taking, but arguing about it—paying months of interest on a construction loan to fight with the neighbors—was also expensive. Parking cost money, but it bought the acquiescence of politicians, lenders, and neighbors.

The vast subsidy for car parking was just part of the way the deck was stacked in favor of suburban life, from the mortgage interest deduction to biased lending practices to gerrymandered school districts to cheap gas and other unpriced externalities of driving. But in spite of all that, the most expensive places to live in the country were, by and large, densely populated and walkable city neighborhoods. If the market was sending a signal for more of anything, it was that. No sooner had I been convinced of this than the balance of city parking changed. On a deep level, the parking obsession kept people out: Parking laws made infill development impossible. Parking concerns torpedoed affordable housing.


Top 10 Brussels, Bruges, Antwerp & Ghent by Antony Mason

Day of the Dead, glass ceiling, haute couture, Mercator projection, walkable city

In the late 19th century, antiquarians recognized Bruges as a historic gem, and began a campaign of preservation and restoration. The city has been a popular tourist destination ever since. In addition to its host of hotels, restaurants and bars, Bruges has internationally famous collections of art. It is also a wonderfully walkable city, with surprising views on every corner. View map Markt Markt The central marketplace of Bruges still retains much of its original outline and is the focal point of the city. It is the site of a market on Wednesday mornings, and a Christmas market (with an ice rink) in December.


pages: 190 words: 50,133

Lonely Planet's 2016 Best in Travel by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, David Attenborough, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, sharing economy, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, sustainable-tourism, tech billionaire, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, walkable city

These range from the physical: clearing trails, improving accessibility, and installing the latest technology, to the inspirational: hosting ‘discovery’ events, involving thousands of young people in volunteer programs, and promoting enjoyment of the parks to urban communities. What’s hot… Deep space, walkable cities, ‘small plate’ dining ___ What’s not… Spying, drones, oversized portions It’s serious work. Serious work that has the most wondrous end: discovery of the national parks themselves. Yosemite’s mighty granite cliffs and fairy-tale waterfalls, Zion’s claustrophobic slot canyons, the steamy swamps of the Everglades, howling wolves, soaring condors, glittering glaciers… There are 340,000 sq km (84.4 million acres) to choose from.


pages: 211 words: 55,075

Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life by David Sim

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, anti-fragile, autonomous vehicles, car-free, carbon footprint, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, place-making, smart cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city

“Close encounters with buildings” in Urban Design International (2006) 11, 29-47. Time of Your Life 11 John Lennon, Beautiful Boy (1980). Getting About and Getting On 12 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House 1961), 36-37. 13 ITDP, Pedestrians First. Tools for a Walkable City (ITDP, 2018). 14 See Jan Gehl. Cities for People (Washington D.C.: Island Press 2010). 15 Jan Gehl. Cities for People (Washington D.C.: Island Press 2010), 131-32. 16 Streets should make up for 30% of the area of a city according to UN Habitat: UN Habitat, Streets as Public Spaces and Drivers of Urban Prosperity (UN Habitat, Nairobi: 2013). 17 City of Perth: Two Way Streets (City of Perth 2014); more on the disadvantage of one way streets in Vikash V.


pages: 215 words: 55,212

The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bike sharing, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, diversification, Firefox, fixed income, Google Earth, impact investing, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, planned obsolescence, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social web, software as a service, TaskRabbit, the built environment, the long tail, vertical integration, walkable city, yield management, young professional, Zipcar

When there are more people nearby to easily access and share cars, clothes, or bikes, the service is more cost-effective and profitable. Partnerships are easier to find and execute. Share platforms such as restaurants, taxis, broadband wireless, apartment buildings, airports, and hotels are more profitable to expand in a denser municipal environment. No wonder that, even in the United States, walkable cities and neighborhoods designed along the lines of European “café society” have become more desirable. Real estate listings feature “walk scores.” There’s even a noticeable reverse migration from American suburbs back to the cities. Urban areas with greater density are also fertile ground for clusters of related Mesh businesses to take root and grow.


pages: 222 words: 50,318

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

We first settled in cities and then in classic suburban locations P R E FAC E | x i when my children were born. As my children were growing, we moved to an exurban location with plenty of land, though the children’s grade school and the country store and post office were all across the road within walking distance. Today, as empty-nesters, my wife and I live in a dense walkable city, able to walk or take transit to just about everything. We use the one car in the household about once a week. My family has experienced just about all forms of metropolitan living possible and has enjoyed each one. Attempting to answer that question I first posed to myself on Market Street in Center City, Philadelphia eventually led me to my first career as a real estate consultant.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

But certainly there is a case to be made that the rise of Web advertising has been, all told, a negative development for the essential public resource of newspaper journalism. The same debate rages over just about every technological advance: Cars moved us more efficiently through space than did horses, but were they worth the cost to the environment or the walkable city? Air-conditioning allowed us to live in deserts, but at what cost to our water supplies? This book is resolutely agnostic on these questions of value. Figuring out whether we think the change is better for us in the long run is not the same as figuring out how the change came about in the first place.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

In any case, the best designers know that the choice of who not to work with is as often more important than who one does choose (or is forced to accept, simply to pay the rent). In a moment when sustainability is gaining more and more traction in design discourse, this future-as-client model moves designers past the defaults of nontoxic inks, recyclable consumables, and walkable cities into deep issues of sustainability, or the very future of design as a human activity. This is all well and good, but how to adopt the future as a client, what methods are available, and how can these methods function beyond the scope of traditional design and interest those of us who are not designers?


pages: 215 words: 71,155

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

Typically, a parade of inspectors is better at harassing than helping, and if the business is successful there are not likely to be any official thank-you’s. I have no doubt that the mayor’s hospitality toward new business reverberated in the hospitality the city now offers to all who live or visit there. Always a walkable city, its public sphere is now great fun to enter. Young Jim Maturani and Michael DeFazio, who opened on North Street, have since been joined by many others who bid welcome to those “on the town” or just seeking respite from daily routines. This medium-sized city hosts a public life that larger centers may well envy.


pages: 281 words: 86,657

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

It may just be a collection of tall buildings arranged a little more compactly than the ones that are there now. In the summer of 2010, Tysons Corner was a jumble of construction activity, but it was all subway. The residential, retail, and office developers had all delayed their plans for the new walkable city, a casualty of the national bank lending crunch and a glut of suburban office space. But the county board had just reaffirmed its support for the entire project, residential towers, gridded streets, and all. The developers insisted they remained committed to it. All seemed convinced that when the transit line opens, New Urbanist development fervor will rise again.


pages: 290 words: 85,847

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

Having grown up in Vienna, a pedestrian-friendly city with grand parks, public squares, and shopping arcades, Gruen was acutely aware of the lack of such communal spaces in suburban America, where everyone traveled by car. So when he was asked to design the Southdale shopping center, he saw it as an opportunity to create a new kind of place: an idealized version of a European, walkable city that would, he hoped, displace the sprawl of roadside shopping strips. The Southdale Center, the first modern enclosed shopping mall, in 1956. His plan placed a shopping center at the heart of a 463-acre development that also included apartment buildings, houses, schools, offices, a hospital, parks, and a lake.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Making New Roads for Cars 1 Joe Cortright, “Reducing Congestion: Katy Didn’t,” City Observatory, December 16, 2015, Cityobservatory.org 2 Patrick Sisson, “Houston’s $7 Billion Solution to Gridlock Is More Highways,” Curbed, August 5, 2019, Archive.curbed.com. 3 Aaron Short, “A Great Big Freeway—Thanks to Induced Demand,” Streetsblog USA, May 8, 2019, Usa.streetsblog.org. 4 Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, North Point Press, 2012, p. 83. 5 Gilles Duranton and Matthew A. Turner, “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities,” American Economic Association 101:6, 2011. 6 Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, HarperCollins, 2015. 7 “The Boring Company Event Webcast,” The Boring Company, December 19, 2018, YouTube.com. 8 Ibid. 9 Aarian Marshall, “Elon Musk Reveals His Awkward Dislike of Mass Transit,” Wired, December 14, 2017, Wired.com. 10 Ibid. 11 “The Boring Company Event Webcast,” The Boring Company. 12 Laura J.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

The accidental discovery of new properties of technologies—like how the magnetron became the microwave—seems to be a common phenomenon. Based on this logic, if we want to increase productive investment in ideas, we should encourage “interdisciplinarity,” casual exchanges between people working in different fields and diverse places. Where these exchanges will happen a lot is in large, walkable cities with plenty of public spaces and opportunities for social interaction. On the other hand, sustained research in a particular area matters too. At least some of the synergies between different ideas work best in a particular field. The microwave oven was a success not just because of the radical leap from military communications to cooking, but also because lots of researchers from Amana, Litton, and their Japanese competitors worked on the design and improved the technology of the magnetron.


pages: 313 words: 92,907

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

The city, belatedly, is building an ultramodern, fully automated subway and rail system, called Dubai Metro, but this attempt to graft transit onto a city like Dubai, even though the project is backed by what occasionally appears to be all the money in the world, is an enterprise destined to disappoint. People who use the new trains will still face the challenge of getting themselves from their metro stop to their final destination, since Dubai must be one of the least walkable cities in the world. I stayed in one small hotel and two big ones—including the Burj Al Arab—and there was no plausible destination to which I could have traveled on foot from any of them. Going from virtually anywhere in Dubai to virtually anywhere else means getting into a car and plunging into the permanent traffic jam that hogties the central city.


Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang

affirmative action, back-to-the-land, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, East Village, Howard Zinn, Lao Tzu, rent control, Telecommunications Act of 1996, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city

Jamaicans, when making oxtail, will soak them in a solution of water and vinegar to let the blood out, then also flash-boil them to “cook off the first.” At our home, we’d flash-boil everything before braising or stewing because it was bad form if the meat had a “stink.” Andy Ricker tells me that in Thailand they won’t even eat lamb because of the smell. § What up, Theo! #LVRS 10. SPECIAL HERBS Pittsburgh was my first time in a walkable city and I finally didn’t need that goddamn Benz. We sold the car and off I went. My Da A-Yi, First Aunt, lived in Monroeville, just outside of the city, and owned Quality Furniture out there. My cousins Allen and Phillip also went to Pittsburgh, and we were all excited to be reunited. It would be the first time in nine years we’d be living in the same place—I was suddenly back like cooked crack and that’s how they treated me.


pages: 425 words: 117,334

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

Woodruff Foundations, Kaiser Permanente and Coca-Cola, and others, including individual wealthy donors such as Weeks or Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson. Because of its low density, Atlanta has an inadequate tax base, and the state contributes little to the city coffers. Without the business elite’s support, few big public projects, including the BeltLine, could succeed. Ray Weeks is himself a late-life convert to walkable city living. Following his divorce and remarriage, he moved from his luxurious semi-rural Garraux Road address in Buckhead to a house near the Eastside Trail, and he has a home in Charleston, South Carolina. He boasts that he can walk virtually everywhere he needs to go in both locations. Still, Weeks is worried.


pages: 416 words: 121,024

How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir by Cat Marnell

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, East Village, Frank Gehry, impulse control, Joan Didion, messenger bag, Norman Mailer, period drama, pez dispenser, Rosa Parks, Russell Brand, urban decay, walkable city, Wall-E, Zipcar

I didn’t sleep the whole nine hours; when we landed, I was un disastro. Thank God for town cars. I practically fell into mine. I felt better when I got to the Hotel Eden, though. It sat atop a hill, and the view from my suite was just glorious. I had time before the Gucci party, so I decided to go for a stroll. I’d never been to Rome. It’s a rather walkable city—especially if one is on Vyvanse—and so I had a nice time navigating the winding streets in the rain. Plus, there was great shopping—rosaries everywhere! I had to bring a few back to Marco. I stopped at a Bancomat machine by the Fontana di Trevi to take out some cash. Tra la la. It was lovely to be in Europe; I hadn’t been there since high school, and gee, look at those pigeons— INSUFFICIENT FUNDS, YOU SPOILED IDIOT DRUG ADDICT FUCKING RETARD LOSER BRAT, the Bancomat screamed at me.


pages: 572 words: 124,222

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

The cabdriver was showing me all the sites when, at one point, he turned to me and said, ‘We have the best mental health care in the world, here.’ And I thought, ‘That’s pretty weird. I’ve never had a cabdriver in California say that to me.’ But that was part of who they are. There’s tremendous pride around that.”26 Progressives say they want livable, walkable cities, but by allowing the continued operation of open-air drug scenes, they are making cities unlivable and unwalkable, as well as inhumane. No psychologist or psychiatrist in America believes meth and fentanyl are appropriate medicines for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression. And yet taxpayers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Los Angeles are, in effect, subsidizing their use and abuse by giving away free hotel rooms, cash, food, and much else.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

According to the United Nations, ‘the battle for sustainable development, for delivering a more environmentally stable, just, and healthier world, is going to be largely won or lost in our cities’.25 With temperatures and population levels increasing, concentrating people in cities is a highly efficient way of bringing clean water, sanitation, healthcare and energy to large numbers of people, while minimising the per capita emissions of greenhouse gases. Public transport systems, the creation of walkable cities, as well as bicycle schemes such as those now operating in Paris, Montreal and London, can all help to reduce the reliance on individual cars in cities. By reducing our carbon footprint, urbanisation might just save the planet. One pioneering project that offers a glimpse of the sustainable cities of the future is Masdar City.


pages: 391 words: 22,799

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

It drove locally owned businesses under, homogenized communities, and degraded the landscape—and all with help from the public purse. With the government contracting out its public housing to for-Â�profit developers, the tenants became loss leaders in a slick real-estate deal. Did residents of this famously walkable city really want to hike across acres of hot asphalt as Red Lobsters and Home Depots followed in the big blue wake of Wal-Mart? Was nothing sacred, demanded preservationists?4 But many of the store’s backers understood the sacred somewhat differently, as several of the prominent African-American ministers in their ranks attested.


pages: 590 words: 156,001

Fodor's Oregon by Fodor's Travel Guides

Airbnb, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, off-the-grid, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, tech bro, tech worker, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

WELCOME TO CENTRAL OREGON TOP REASONS TO GO Escape into the wild: Pack your hiking boots, carabiners, snowboard, and camera to explore snowy mountains, rock formations, rivers, lakes, forests, ancient lava flows, and desert badlands. Get a taste of Bend: See the refined side of the high desert in Bend’s walkable city center, which is packed with upscale restaurants and bars, taprooms, boutiques, and food carts. Kick back at Sunriver: This riverfront resort has bike paths, hiking trails, horse stables, hot tubs, four golf courses, and several restaurants. Tour the brewery scene: With over 30 breweries—and more on the horizon—you can discover nearly any type of beer that fits your tastes.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

This, he noted excitedly, was precisely the diameter of cities in antiquity—they were just wide enough to walk from the edge to the center and back in an hour’s time. Drawing on the empirical work of the economist Yakov Zahavi, he demonstrated that this pattern is fixed in history. The time we spend commuting has never changed, only our modes of transportation have. The Berlin of 1800 was a compact, walkable city. But as horse trams came along, followed by electric trams, then subways, and finally cars, the city’s periphery raced away from its Enlightenment-era core. Berlin’s diameter was effectively ten times wider in 1950 than it was 150 years earlier, yet it still took only an hour to traverse. The rule has since been dubbed Marchetti’s Constant.


Sweden Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, G4S, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, walkable city, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

Gothenburg %031 / Pop 580,000 Gregarious, chilled-out Gothenburg (Göteborg) has considerable appeal for tourists and locals alike. Neoclassical architecture lines its tram-rattled streets, locals sun themselves beside canals, and there's always an interesting cultural or social event going on. Gothenburg is a very walkable city. From Centralstationen in the north, shop-lined Östra Hamngatan leads southeast across one of Gothenburg’s 17th-century canals, through verdant Kungsparken (King’s Park) to the city’s boutique and upscale bar-lined ‘Avenyn’ (Kungsportsavenyn) boulevard. The waterfront abounds with all things nautical, from ships, aquariums and sea-related museums to the freshest fish.


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

Worst-case scenario is a driver who decides to terminate the ride, in which case you can pick up the next black-and-white that comes along. All that has ever happened to me with this stunt is a somewhat sullen driver. 08_259290-ch05.qxp 80 7/22/08 12:29 AM Page 80 CHAPTER 5 . CAIRO ON FOOT At first glance, Cairo looks chaotic and terribly crowded with cars, donkeys, buses, and people, but it’s actually a surprisingly walkable city for the reasonably fit. Safety is a very minor concern in Cairo, with random violent crime virtually unheard of and pickpocketing rare. What is fairly common, however, is general hassling. In a car or on a bus, you’ll be cut off from the street, but walking through town there will be a lot of people who want to talk to you and get a tip.


The Rough Guide to Norway by Phil Lee

banking crisis, bike sharing, car-free, centre right, company town, Easter island, glass ceiling, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, out of africa, place-making, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, walkable city, white picket fence

They begin with urbane, vivacious Oslo, one of the world’s most prettily sited capitals, with a flourishing café scene and a clutch of outstanding museums. Beyond Oslo, in roughly descending order of interest, are Trondheim, with its superb cathedral and charming, antique centre; the beguiling port of Bergen, gateway to the western fjords; gritty, bustling Stavanger in the southwest; and northern Tromsø. All are likeable, walkable cities worthy of time in themselves, as well as being within comfortable reach of some startlingly handsome scenery. Indeed, each can serve as a starting point for further explorations or as a weekend destination in their own right. And wherever you arrive, the trains, buses and ferries of Norway’s finely tuned public transport system will take you almost anywhere you want to go, although services are curtailed in winter.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

,” 78. Logue explains “planning with people” in “Logue on Boston: ‘Never Satisfied,’” CSM, April 20, 1962.   91. Del Vecchio, “Topical Notes,” 5.   92. Margaret Logue, email message to author, March 21, 2011. The BG reporter Martin Nolan also recalled how much Logue loved Beacon Hill and the “walkable city” it was a part of; Martin Nolan, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 24, 2007, Cambridge, MA.   93. Logue, interview by Kennedy, 2. Logue discussed Collins’s strengths on many occasions; see for example, Logue, “Boston, 1960–1967—Seven Years of Plenty,” 83.   94. Arnone, “Redevelopment in Boston,” 143.   95.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

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

The relative efficiency of the next generation of solar cells is trivial by comparison.”31 This book is about those radical changes on the social side, as well as on the political, economic, and cultural sides. What concerns me is less the mechanics of the transition—the shift from brown to green energy, from sole-rider cars to mass transit, from sprawling exurbs to dense and walkable cities—than the power and ideological roadblocks that have so far prevented any of these long understood solutions from taking hold on anything close to the scale required. It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power.


Scandinavia by Andy Symington

call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, connected car, edge city, Eyjafjallajökull, full employment, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, period drama, retail therapy, Skype, the built environment, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city, work culture , young professional

Four Days As above, but with a little detour out of town on the third day – if the weather’s nice, rent a bicycle and follow the bicycle path to Drottningholm Slott . Keep the Swedish-history theme going with a meal at Den Gyldene Freden . Next day, take a boat tour onto the archipelago, then dine at the Grand Hôtel’s Verandan restaurant and finish in style with a drink at Operan . Sights Stockholm is a compact, walkable city, with sights distributed across all central neighbourhoods. The modern city spreads out from its historic core, Gamla Stan, home to the Royal Palace. Two smaller, satellite islands are linked to it by bridges: Riddarholmen, whose church is home to the royal crypt, to the west, and Helgeandsholmen, home of the Swedish parliament building, to the north.


The Rough Guide to Morocco by Rough Guides

colonial exploitation, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, place-making, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban renewal, walkable city

From the airport, bus #37 drops you off right next to the grand taxi station in Inezgane; for the bus station, just walk across to the other side of the grand taxi stands; buses to Agadir stop around the corner on the Agadir road. From Agadir, Inezgane can be reached by grand taxi from Place Salam (4dh, or 6dh at night), or on bus #97 or #98 from Avenue Mohammed V. GETTING AROUND Agadir is for the most part a walkable city, though you may want to use petits taxis for transport between the bus or taxi stations and Talborjt or the beach hotels. Alternatively, you can rent scooters or motorbikes, which would also allow you to explore the beaches north and south of town. By bus The main city bus terminal is at Pl Salam (Pl de l’Abbatoir), a couple of blocks north of the grand taxi station, but the most useful routes run along Bd Mohammed V.


Southwest USA Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, Columbine, Day of the Dead, Donner party, El Camino Real, friendly fire, G4S, haute couture, haute cuisine, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), low earth orbit, machine readable, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, Works Progress Administration, X Prize

Metropolitan Tucson Sights 1 Aerospace Maintenance & Regeneration Center C3 2 Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum A3 3 Gates Pass Scenic Overlook B3 4 Mission San Xavier del Bac B4 5 Old Tucson Studios A3 6 Pima Air & Space Museum C4 7 Sabino Canyon C2 Activities, Courses & Tours 8 Mt Lemmon Ski Area D1 Sleeping 9 Desert Trails B&B D3 10 Gilbert Ray Campground A3 11 Hacienda del Sol C2 Eating Grill at Hacienda del Sol (see 11) 12 Janos C2 13 Tiny's Saloon & Steakhouse B3 DOWNTOWN TUCSON Downtown Tucson has a valid claim to being the oldest urban space in Arizona. Although spates of construction have marred the historical facade, this is still a reasonably walkable city center. Tucson Museum of Art & Historic Block MUSEUM (520-624-2333; www.tucsonmuseumofart.org; 140 Main Ave; adult/child/student/senior $8/free/3/6; 10am-4pm Tue-Sat, noon-4pm Sun) For a small city, Tucson boasts an impressive art museum. There’s a respectable collection of Western and contemporary art, and the permanent exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts will awaken your inner Indiana Jones.


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

Amtrak ( 414-271-0840; 433 W St Paul Ave) runs the Hiawatha train seven times a day to/from Chicago ($22, 1½ hours); catch it downtown (it shares the station with Greyhound) or at the airport. The Milwaukee County Transit System (www.ridemcts.com; fare $2.25) provides the local bus service. Bus 31 goes to Miller Brewery; bus 90 goes to Miller Park. For taxi service, try phoning Yellow Cab ( 414-271-1800). Madison Madison reaps a lot of kudos – most walkable city, best road-biking city, most vegetarian friendly, gay friendly, environmentally friendly and just plain all-round friendliest city in the USA. Ensconced on a narrow isthmus between Mendota and Monona Lakes, it’s a pretty combination of small, grassy state capital and liberal, bookish college town.


pages: 1,909 words: 531,728

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, banking crisis, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, company town, Day of the Dead, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Francisco Pizarro, garden city movement, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, off grid, openstreetmap, place-making, restrictive zoning, side project, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city

It has little in the way of tourist sights, though its huge student population ensures a high concentration of lively bars. Founded in 1550, the city was the administrative and military capital of colonial Chile. It suffered considerable structural damage in the huge 2010 earthquake. What to see and do The heart of Concepción’s walkable city centre, lined with a mixture of elegant old buildings and modern concrete blocks, is the carefully landscaped Plaza de la Independencia. Partially pedestrianized Barros Arana, the main thoroughfare, has shops and places to eat, while at the western end lies the lively Barrio Estación, whose trendy bars and restaurants are centred on Plaza España.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Amtrak ( 414-271-0840; 433 W St Paul Ave) runs the Hiawatha train seven times a day to/from Chicago ($22, 1½ hours); catch it downtown (it shares the station with Greyhound) or at the airport. The Milwaukee County Transit System (www.ridemcts.com; fare $2.25) provides the local bus service. Bus 31 goes to Miller Brewery; bus 90 goes to Miller Park. For taxi service, try phoning Yellow Cab ( 414-271-1800) . Madison Madison reaps a lot of kudos – most walkable city, best road-biking city, most vegetarian friendly, gay friendly, environmentally friendly and just plain all-round friendliest city in the USA. Ensconced on a narrow isthmus between Mendota and Monona Lakes, it’s a pretty combination of small, grassy state capital and liberal, bookish college town.