How to Start a Week
12 December 2011 | Hidden City Daily
How do we understand the city—in stats, in rankings? Borges has another idea.
Land of Expectations
3 November 2011 | Hidden City Daily
Why? My sense is that it’s a result of a recent push for planning and civic engagement. After a good two decades or more of purely reactionary public policy, meant only to avert disaster, we’re planning. And planning means imagining, planning means creating, planning means playing out the conceit that we can shape the future.
Talking Flash Mobs and Flash Robs in La Vanguardia
26 August 2011
I was interviewed on the subject by Marc Bassets, a correspondent for La Vanguardia, Catalunya, Spain’s leading Spanish language daily
Net Zero
6 July 2011
Isn’t this, too, the ennui of urban America? Yes, amid the urban resurgence—there is a Mexican resurgence too, more on that below—most old American cities are paralyzed by economic, political, and fiscal forces outside their control.
The Cultural Legacy of All Mankind
15 June 2011
There are some 56 Chinese central cities with more than a million residents; most of us can’t even name the top five (Shanghai, Beijing, Guongzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin). Despite our ignorance, Chinese urbanization is one of the great human stories of our time, of course…