New Urbanism

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pages: 356 words: 91,157

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

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

All three—Trump, Ford, and Brexit—reflect the deepening fault lines of class and location that define and divide us today. These political cleavages ultimately stem from the far deeper economic and geographic structures of the New Urban Crisis. They are the product of our new age of winner-take-all urbanism, in which the talented and the advantaged cluster and colonize a small, select group of superstar cities, leaving everybody and everywhere else behind. Much more than a crisis of cities, the New Urban Crisis is the central crisis of our time. This book is my attempt to grapple with the New Urban Crisis and the deep contradictions of our cities and our society writ large. In writing it, I have three primary objectives: to spell out the key dimensions of this crisis; to identify the fundamental forces that are shaping it; and to outline what we need to do to bring about a new and more inclusive urbanism that encourages innovation and wealth creation while generating good jobs, rising living standards, and a better way of life for all.

That’s why I prefer to call them the New Urban Luddites instead of NIMBYs, which sounds more benign. The original Luddites, named after their semi-mythical leader, Ned Ludd, took hammers to the weaving machines that were taking away their livelihoods during England’s Industrial Revolution.23 Over the course of the next century, ironically, those factories would lift living standards to higher levels than the Luddites could have ever imagined. The original Luddites, at least, were poor. The New Urban Luddites aren’t exploited workers, but some of the biggest winners of winner-take-all urbanism. This New Urban Luddism is codified in the enormous and complex thicket of zoning laws and other land use regulations that restrict the supply of housing in many cities.

My broader statistical analysis reinforces this basic pattern. The New Urban Crisis Index is positively and significantly correlated with the size and density of metros, their concentrations of high-tech industry, their shares of creative-class workers and college graduates, and their levels of economic output, income, and wages. The New Urban Crisis also closely follows America’s political divide, being positively and significantly associated with the share of votes for Clinton in 2016 and negatively associated with the share of Trump votes. Once again, we see that the New Urban Crisis is a fundamental feature of larger, denser, richer, more liberal, more educated, more high-tech, and more creative-class metro areas.2 Figure 10.1: The New Urban Crisis Index Source: Martin Prosperity Institute, based on data from the US Census and the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.


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

Others say they aren’t solving the problems posed by the suburbs because they build on large plots often in the middle of nowhere, which has led to the nickname “New Suburbanism” (one blogger described New Urbanism as a “pretty veil over common suburbia”). New Urbanism communities can be expensive to build and their homes expensive to buy. Getting over conventional zoning codes is often problematic and requires lots of patience, and often compromise: FHA loan rules still limit the percentage of commercial real estate in vertical apartment units, making it hard for New Urbanism developers to secure financing for the mixed-use buildings they say are a critical ingredient in their neighborhoods. Nevertheless, New Urbanism principles have been followed and copied over the years.

During the conference’s main stage sessions, Le Corbusier, the French pioneer of modernist architecture who envisioned a high-rise city, is invoked as many times as the movement’s enemy as Jane Jacobs is as their hero. The main principles of New Urbanism have not changed much since its founding twenty years ago. New Urbanism is not a rating or rule book like, say, LEED, the third-party green building accreditation that requires structures adhere to a set of specific standards to earn its label; rather, it’s a set of basic principles and guidelines—a sort of neighborhood DNA code—for developers, planners, designers, and policy makers who wish to design neighborhoods based on traditional town planning methods. Most New Urbanism developments have certain identifying characteristics: narrower or more “modest-sized” streets, an easily identifiable town center, a Main Street lined with buildings that mix commercial and residential spaces, and a mixture of housing types throughout the rest of the neighborhood—single-family detached houses, attached town houses, and apartments—all commingled together.

Most New Urbanism developments have certain identifying characteristics: narrower or more “modest-sized” streets, an easily identifiable town center, a Main Street lined with buildings that mix commercial and residential spaces, and a mixture of housing types throughout the rest of the neighborhood—single-family detached houses, attached town houses, and apartments—all commingled together. New Urbanism is not architecture; New Urbanists are almost agnostic to what the houses’ exteriors look like, or even to the architectural style of the neighborhood. In the same way Clarence Perry, whose neighborhood unit helped transform suburban design, had nothing to do with the design of homes in those neighborhoods, New Urbanism theories relate primarily to a community’s bones, or the design and layout of the neighborhood itself. As it was with Seaside, the goal of New Urbanism is to create neighborhoods whose design serves a social as well as a physical purpose.


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

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

The typical neotraditional house, which populates many New Urban neighborhoods, has an airy, freeflowing interior enclosed within a colonial shell. Neotraditionalism is an apt term to describe the New Urbanism, because the New Urbanism’s intention is to advocate what works best: what pattern of development is the most environmentally sensitive, socially responsible, and economically sustainable. As is often the case, what seems to work best is a historic model—the traditional neighborhood—adapted as necessary to serve the needs of modern man. The commonsense nature of the New Urbanism bodes well for its future. The fact that it was not invented, but selected and adapted from existing models, dramatically distinguishes it from the concepts of total replacement that preceded it.

It took many years and many failures for planners and architects to reach this point, but so many new inventions have fared so badly that designers have been forced to put some faith in human experience. Further experience will no doubt modify the precepts and techniques of the New Urbanism, but that is as it should be. THE CHARTER OF THE NEW URBANISM INTRODUCTION The Congress for the New Urbanism views divestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Steuteville, Robert. The New Urbanism and Traditional Neighborhood Development: Comprehensive Report and Best Practices Guide. Ithaca, N.Y: New Urban Press, 1999. Surface Transportation Policy Project. “Campaign Connection.” Surface Transportation Policy Project Progress IX.2 (May 1999): 8. ————. Tea-21 User’s Guide: Making the Most of the New Transportation Bill. Report, 1998. Swift, Peter. “Residential Street Typology and Injury Accident Frequency.” Report by Swift Associates, 1997. Tu, Charles, and Mark Eppli. Valuing the New Urbanism: The Case of Kentlands. Report by the George Washington University Department of Finance, 1997.


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

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

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

As Kelbaugh (2008a: 112) notes, the differing clientele explains some of the contrasting tendencies, with New Urbanists typically working for land developers, especially on suburban greenfield projects, and also on less well-known urban redevelopment projects, sponsored by government agencies or public/private partnerships; Everyday Urbanists typically working for non-profit and community groups with limited resources and political power; and Post-Urbanist projects typically resulting from prestigious competitions, commissioned ‘… by wealthy and powerful institutions, corporations and patrons who seek high profile, iconic buildings.’ New Urbanism New Urbanism characterises a set of ideas that appeared primarily in the USA during the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s. The movement was formalised by the creation of the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) (see Chapter 1), publication of the Charter for New Urbanism (www.cnu.org) styled on CIAM’s Charter of Athens (1933), subsequent annual conferences and a slew of publications. According to their Charter (CNU 1998), New Urbanists are ‘…. committed to re-establishing the relationship between the art of building and the making of community, through citizen based participatory planning and design.’

A plea for place in the public realm, Architectural Review, No 1101 (November) 31–41 Buchanan, P (1988b) Facing up to facades, Architects Journal, 188(50) 21–56 Building Design Partnership (2002) Urban Design for Retail Environments, British Council of Shopping Centres, London Building for Life (2008) Evaluating housing principles step by step, http://www.buildingforlife.org/ Building Research Establishment (BRE) (1999) An Assessment of the Police's Secured by Design Project, BRE, Watford Building Research Establishment (BRE) (1990) BRE Digest 350: Climate and Site Development, BRE, Watford Burton, E & Mitchell, L (2006) Inclusive Urban Design: Streets for Life, Architectural Pre Baird, G (2008) The New Urbanism and public space, in Haas, T (2008) (editor), New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future, Rizzoli International, New York, 120–123 Biddulph, M; Franklin, B & Tait, M (2003) From concept to completion: A critical analysis of the urban village, Town Planning Review, 74(2), 165–193 Brain, D (2008) Beyond the neighbourhood: New Urbanism as civic renewal, in Haas, T (2008) (editor), New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future, Rizzoli International, New York, 249–254 Butina Watson, G & Bentley, I (2007) Identity by Design, Architectural Press, Oxford C CABE (2009) Hallmarks of a Sustainable City, CABE, London CABE Space (2008) Public Space Lessons: Designing and Planning Play, CABE, London CABE (2008) Inclusion by Design: Equality, Diversity and the Built Environment CABE, London CABE Space (2007) Living with Risk: Promoting Better Public Space Design, CABE, London CABE (2006) The Principles of Inclusive Design (They Include You) CABE, London CABE (2005) Design Coding: Testing Its in Use in England, CABE, London CABE (2004a) Creating Successful Masterplans: A Guide for Clients, CABE, London CABE (2004b) Local Authority Design Champions, CABE, London CABE (2003a) Protecting Design Quality in Planning, CABE, London CABE (2003b) The Councillor's Guide to Urban Design, CABE, London CABE (2002) Paving the Way: How we can achieve clean, safe and attractive streets CABE, London (commissioned by CABE and ODPM, produced by Alan Baxter & Associates in association with EDAW) Calthorpe, P (2005) New Urbanism: Principles or style?

, The Guardian, Saturday January 13, p 27 Sudjic, D (1993) The 100 Mile City, Flamingo, London Syms, P (2002) Land, Development & Design, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford T Tahrani, S & Moreau, G (2008), Integration of immersive walking to analyse urban daylighting ambiences, Journal of Urban Design, 13(1), 99–124 Talen, E (2009a) Bad parenting, in Krieger, A & Saunders, W S (2009) (editors) Urban Design, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 183–185 Talen, E (2009b) Design by the rules: The historical underpinnings of form-based codes Journal of the American Planning Association, 75(2), 144–160 Talen, E (2009c) Urban Design Reclaimed: Tools, Techniques, and Strategies for Planners, American Planning Association, Washington DC Talen, E (2008a) The Design of Diversity: Exploring Socially Mixed Neighbourhoods, Architectural Press, Oxford Talen, E (2008b) The unbearable lightness of New Urbanism’, in Haas, T (2008), New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future, Rizzoli International, New York, 77–79 Talen E (2005) New Urbanism and American Planning, Routledge, London Talen, E (2002) Help for planning: The transect strategy Journal of Urban Design, 7(3), 293–312 Talen, E (2000) The problem with community in planning, Journal of Planning Literature, 15(2), 171–183 Talen, E (1999) Sense of community and neighbourhood form: An assessment of the social doctrine of New Urbanism, Urban Studies, 36(8) 1361–1379 Taylor, A F; Wiley, A; Kuo, F E & Sullivan, W C (1998) Growing up in the inner city – Green spaces as places to grow, Environment and Behaviour, 30(1), 2–27 Taylor, D & Filmer-Sankey, W (2003) DB32 and the design of good urban streets, Municipal Engineer, 151, 111–116 Taylor, D (2002) Highway Rules’, Urban Design Quarterly, 81, 27–29 Terence O'Rourke plc (1998) Planning for Passive Solar Design, BRECSU, Watford Thiel, P (1961) A sequence-experience notation for architectural and urban space, Town Planning Review, 32, 33–52 Thorne, R & Filmer-Sankey, W (2003) ‘Transportation’ in Thomas, R (2003) (editor) Sustainable Urban Design – An Environmental Approach, Spon Press, London, 25–32 Thwaites, K; Porta, S; Romice, O; & Greaves, M (2007) (editors) Urban Sustainability Through Environmental Design: Approaches to Time-People-Place Responsive Urban Spaces, Routledge, London Tibbalds, F (1992) Making People Friendly Towns: Improving the Public Environment in Towns and Cities, Longman, Harlow Tibbalds, F (1988a) Ten commandments of urban design, The Planner, 74(12), 1 Tibbalds, F (1988b) Mind the Gap!’


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

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. NEW URBANISM AND THE POOR I am always astounded when people attack New Urbanism as elitist and not in the best interests of poor people. It seems as obvious to me that an auto-dominated community is as detrimental to poor people as it seems obvious that community designrecommended by New Urbanism reduces the need for car travel and is beneficial. New Urbanism seems to be the best chance to reduce car dependency through urban design, which is an important reason why I am so enthusiastic about it.

The most effective, desirable strategy is to establish context-sensitive community regulations that transition from walkable to auto-oriented to rural and wildlife preserve (a concept New Urbanists call a “transect“ system). For the walkable portion of the community, the leading design paradigm today is the New Urbanism. New Urbanism is a set of development practices that creates more people-oriented communities—attractive, efficient, sociable, and pedestrian friendly—at the same time that it significantly reduces car dependence. According to Duany, a leader in this design strategy: “Since its founding in 1992, New Urbanism has been the antithesis of sprawl, because it designs communities that are balanced in function; creates inclusive housing; supports home-based business; spa-tially defines the public realm; facilitates pedestrian accessibility; minimizes use of the car; supports transit; and builds on infill [in-town] as well as greenfield [newly developed] sites.”1ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL: THE TRANSECT SYSTEM You can choose any color you want, Henry Ford notably told early car buyers, as long as it is black.

I would resign myself, along with everyone else, to increasingly unlivable communities, more time trapped in my car on the road, more frustration and isolation, more inescapable congestion, until the economic and social and emotional costs of being car dependent became unbearable for a critical mass of people. Twenty more years? Fifty? But there is hope. An important subcategory of smart growth is the “New Urbanism,” a strategy of community and neighborhood design that uses timeless, traditional development principles at the same time it incorporates contemporary technology and values; the pedestrian, not the car, is the design imperative (see chapters 9 and 10). As Marvin Harris pointed out in Cultural Materialism (1979), it is not ideas that determine our behavior and values, but the environmental and economic conditions we must cope with each day.


pages: 512 words: 131,112

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

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

Retrofits are responding to significant demographic and behavioral changes in suburban areas and are the first tantalizing steps in the larger project of retrofitting the systems of sprawl itself. INTRODUCTION We intend this book to inform architects, urban designers, planners, developers, public officials, and citizens interested in helping suburbs and metropolitan regions, both aging and booming, to grow in healthy ways. In keeping with the principles of both new urbanism and smart growth, we see these retrofits as an enormous opportunity to direct new growth into existing areas, both the by-passed first-ring suburbs and the bustling outlying nodes. The cases we describe provide vivid examples of attractive, viable alternatives to business-as-usual sprawl.1 We believe these alternatives promise to make both the existing locations and the larger region more sustainable.

• Suburban form is predominantly funded by short-term investors interested in volume, such as publicly traded real estate investment trusts (REITs) and large home builders, while urban form is more likely to be funded with a combination of short- and longer-term investment vehicles as well as a variety of public-private partnerships. A stand-alone office tower on an arterial road in Southfield, Michigan. A new, urban mixed-use building, developed by the Buckingham Companies, on a main street in the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel. Credit: Courtesy of the Buckingham Companies. The suburban retrofits we have chosen to document started out as single-use, stand-alone, private, disconnected, short-term investments on sites characterized by a preponderance of “underperforming asphalt.”

Students Sahnur Bostan, Fred Godbolt, Kristen Halloran, and Renee Hartley provided valuable assistance with graphics and background research. Ellen’s earlier students at UVA and MIT offered more inspiration than they know, including Ben Chung, Christine McGrath, Andrew Miller, and Wendy Redfield. Many of the designers, developers, and planners who contributed to projects featured in this book are members of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). We acknowledge the crucial role that the Congress has played in recent decades in forcing the hand of “business as usual” suburban developers, and in empowering designers and planners to believe that the rules of the game can be radically changed. CNU’s seminal publications, Greyfields into Goldfields and Malls into Mainstreets were important precursors to this book.


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

Its best-known, iconic projects, such as Seaside, Florida; Kentlands, Maryland; and Stapleton, Colorado,7 are second-home or bedroom communities (neighborhood-serving) that may or may not become regional-serving someday. “TND” as a term tends to be interchangeable with “New Urbanism” and focuses on neighborhoodserving places. New Urbanism and TNDs have played pivotal roles in the rebirth of neighborhood-serving places in suburban greenfields. Use of this type of development has demonstrated that walkable neighborhood demand can be built from scratch. Andres Duany, one of the founders of the Congress of the New Urbanism and a leading thinker and architect, has justified New Urbanism suburban development by saying that most future development will go to the suburban greenfield sites, so they might as well be walkable.

Many readers familiar with recent trends in the built environment will notice that I have not used some terms common over the past fifteen years, such as “transit-oriented development,” “New Urbanism,” and “traditional neighborhood development” (TND). The description “transit-oriented development” can and does apply to most regional-serving, walkable urban places. (It is possible, but not ideal, to be nontransit-served and still create 118 | THE OPTION OF URBANISM walkable urbanism, as some of the examples below demonstrate). Transitoriented development can occur in any density that supports transit. In general, New Urbanism has played out on the ground as neighborhood-serving walkable urbanism. Its best-known, iconic projects, such as Seaside, Florida; Kentlands, Maryland; and Stapleton, Colorado,7 are second-home or bedroom communities (neighborhood-serving) that may or may not become regional-serving someday.

HT384.U5L45 2008 307.760973—dc22 2007026186 Printed on recycled, acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Search terms: urban, suburban, sprawl, auto-dependent, real estate product development types, transportation, Futurama, affordable housing, inclusionary zoning, impact fees, New Urbanism, transit-oriented development, American Dream, S&L crisis, walkable urbanism, drivable sub-urbanism, global warming, carbon load, obesity, asthma, favored quarter, metropolitan, regionalism, urbanization, population growth, REIT For Helen, Lisa, and Tom Also for Bob, Gadi, Joe, Pat, and Robert C ONTENTS Preface | ix INTRODUCTION 1 FUTU RAMA | AND THE 1 2 0 TH- C E N T U RY AMERICAN DREAM | 12 2 TH E R I S E 3 T H E S TA N D A R D R E A L E S TAT E OF D R I VA B L E S U B - U R B I A | P R O D U C T TY P E S : W H Y E V E R Y P L A C E LO O K S L I K E EV E RY PL AC E EL S E 4 CONSEQUENCES OF D R I VA B L E SUB - URBAN GROW TH 5 63 TH E M A R K E T R E D I S C OV E R S WA L K A B L E U R B A N I S M 6 | | 86 D E F I N I N G WA L K A B L E U R B A N I S M : WH Y M O R E IS BETTER | 113 vii | 45 31 viii | CONTENTS 7 UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES WA L K A B L E U R B A N I S M 8 ACH I EVI NG LEVELING THE THE | OF 13 8 NEX T AMERICAN DREAM : P L AY I N G F I E L D AND I M P L E M E N T I N G WA L K A B L E U R B A N I S M N OT ES INDEX | | 177 2 01 | 15 0 P REFACE When I was a young child my mother took me to Center City, Philadelphia from our inner-suburban home to visit my father in his office and to go shopping.


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

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

“The potential impact of falling fertility rates on the economy and culture,” Deseret News National, http://national.deseretnews.com/article/1522/the-potential-impact-of-falling-fertility-rates-on-the-economy-and-culture.html CONFESSORE, Nicholas. (2006, August 6). “Cities Grow Up, and Some See Sprawl,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/weekinreview/06confessore.html. CONN, Steven. (2004, August 17). “Let’s make suburbs into cities: New urbanism, car culture and the future of community,” Salon, http://www.salon.com/2014/08/17/lets_make_suburbs_into_cities_new_urbanism_car_culture_and_the_future_of_community/. CONSTANTINEAU, Bruce. (2014, March 17). “‘Huge demand’ for tiny rental units in Vancouver,” Vancouver Sun. http://www.vancouversun.com/Huge+demand+tiny+rental+units+Vancouver/9628610/story.html.

“The Demographic Future,” Foreign Affairs, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66805/nicholas-eberstadt/the-demographic-future. ——— (2015, February 21). “The Global Flight From the Family,” Wall Street Journal, http://www.wsj.com/articles/nicholas-eberstadt-the-global-flight-from-the-family-1424476179. EDSALL, Thomas B. (2013, October 22). “Bill de Blasio and the New Urban Populism,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/opinion/edsall-bill-de-blasio-and-the-new-urban-populism.html. EFRATI, Amir. (2006, June 2). “The Suburbs Under Siege,” Wall Street Journal, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114921327859169468. EHRLICH, Paul. (1968). The Population Bomb, New York: Ballantine Books. EISCHEN, Kyle. (2000, March 19).

See also Everyday life Lifestyle centers, 177 Liotta, Peter, 53 Lithuania, 138 Liu, Eveleen, 166 Living well, 5, 6 Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, 176 Locational preferences, 38 Logan, John, 39 London aging population in, 130 as “connected” city, 85 dispersion from, 28–29 educational gap in, 166 foreign-born population of, 97 foreign housing investments in, 100, 101 as global city, 87–89, 97, 274n8 global influence of, 82 growth of, 51 homogenization of, 106 housing prices in, 41 as new consumer city, 37 in 19th century, 28 objection to densification in, 13, 199 population of, 51, 52, 115, 155 post-familialism in, 117–118 slums in, 58 suburbs of, 143, 155 as wealthy city, 52 working classes in, 27 Longman, Phillip, 137 Los Angeles black children living in, 156 commuting time in, 68 as “connected” city, 85 environmental wastefulness of, 11 as federation of communities, 176 foreign-born population of, 98 foreign housing investments in, 101 global influence of, 82 growth of, 176 and housing bubble, 134, 152 income spent on rent in, 174 inequality in, 95–96 as luxury-oriented city, 40 migration to, 173 as “necessary” city, 83 opposition to increased density in, 13 pollution in, 196 population of, 52 post-familialism in, 128 suburban inequality around, 159 as wealthy city, 52 Louv, Richard, 192 Luanda, 54 Lutz, Wolfgang, 130, 136, 195 “Luxurious extinction,” 144–145 Luxury-oriented cities, 39–40, 43–44 Lynd, Robert, 151 M Macau, 183 Madison, 9 Madrid, 154–155 Mahmoudi, Dillon, 42 Making Smart Growth work (Porter), 165 Malaysia, 85, 90 Malthusian urbanism, 192–194 Manchester, 27, 115 Manhattan asset-backed wealth in, 96 children living in, 15, 16 and densification proposal, 13 high-density development in, 146–147 inequality in, 97 information economy in, 38 as Le Corbusier’s inspiration, 7 move to Brooklyn from, 177 neighborhoods of, 142 single households in, 117, 139 Manila, 55, 63–64, 66, 69 Marin County, California, 178 Markham (Canada), 158 Marriage, 129–130, 180 Martelle, Scott, 32 Marx, Karl, 25, 51 Master-planned communities, 30–31, 176–177 Maya, 167 Megacities, 6, 49–78 alternatives to, 72–74 ancient, 56–58 colonial legacy in, 60–61 density decline in, 14 dispersion in, 155 early industrial cities, 58–59 health conditions in, 65–67 and humanization of urbanization, 74–76 infrastructure problems in, 67–70 in late 19th century Europe, 59–60 life expectancy in, 65 limits of density in, 76–78 negative conditions in, 61–65 and prosperity, 54–56 quality of life in, 65–67 rise of, 50–54 slums in, 69–72 Mehta, Suketu, 55, 56, 68 Melaka, Malaysia, 81 Melbourne, 98, 158–159 Merkel, Angela, 138 Metropolitan areas, 263n5, 269n5, 274n8 Mexico, 53, 73, 139 Mexico City appeal of, 22 colonialism in, 60 commuting time in, 68 employment in, 64 as megacity, 51 middle class in, 63 organic growth of, 73 pattern of building in, 55–56 share of national GDP, 55 tech employment in, 185 urbanization in, 53 water system in, 68–69 Miami, 97–98, 100, 134, 152 Michigan, 188 Micro-units/micro-apartments, 12, 132–133 Middle class, 64 detached housing of, 160 encouraging growth of, 194 forces undermining, 93–97 global cities and, 92–97 homeownership and, 153 in Mexico City, 63 move to periphery by, 116 and shift to suburbs, 150 smart growth vs. interests of, 44 Middle East, 98, 100, 138 Migration, 62–63, 76, 77, 85, 99, 136–139 Milan, 115, 137, 154 Milch, Michael, 111 Mildner, Gerard, 11 Millennials, 170–176, 179–180, 189 Mills, Edwin, 59–60 Milton Keynes, 149, 163, 197 Minneapolis, 156–157 Miskel, James, 53 Mississauga (Canada), 158 Modarres, Ali, 2, 62, 64–65 Modi, Narendra, 76 Molotch, Harvey, 39 Montreal, 117 Moral order, 22 More developed world, 280n58 Mori, Minoru, 70 Morocco, 139 Morrill, Richard, 159 Morrison, Herbert, 148 Moscow, 33, 34, 52, 82, 194–195 Multigenerational households, 182–183 Multiracial suburbs, 156–159 Mumbai, 49–50 colonial influence in, 87 colonialism in, 60 employment in, 64 housing conditions in, 69–70 infrastructure lack in, 68, 69 life expectancy in, 65 living conditions in, 62, 64, 75 population of, 54, 170 tech employment in, 185 Mumford, Lewis, 2 on ancient Rome, 57 on civic identity, 21 on Radburn, 30 on small units, 200–201 on suburbia, 160 on technical prowess, 200 Munich, 118 Murray, Charles, 131 Myanmar, 124 N Nagoya, 52, 153, 176 Nantucket, 188 Naperville, Illinois, 177 Napoleon III, 8, 29, 59 Nature, connecting with, 46, 191–192 Navi Mumbai, 185 Nazis, 35 “Necessary” cities, 83–84 Nelson, Ted, 141 Netherlands attitude toward immigrants in, 98 dispersion of economic activities in, 185 focus on family in, 113–114 immigrants to, 98 producer cities in, 25–26 New consumer cities, 36–42 New Deal, 30, 150, 176 New Jersey, 178 New Orleans, 32, 107, 144–145 News Corp, 130 New social environment, 132 New Urbanism, 7, 151, 161, 164 New urban paradigm, 19, 42–43. See also Human city New York City black children living in, 156 childlessness in, 117 children in, 15–16 commuting time in, 68 as consumer city, 89 cost of space in, 111–112 diverse society of, 86 educational gap in, 166 environmental wastefulness of, 11 family households in, 144 financial jobs in, 186 foreign-born population of, 98 foreign housing investments in, 100–102 as global city, 84, 87–89, 107, 274n8 global influence of, 82 growth of, 51 Gunther on, 93 homogenization of, 106 housing bubble in, 134 and impact of life stages, 165 income spent on rent in, 174 inequality in, 40, 95–97 Le Corbusier on density of, 7 as megacity, 51 micro-units in, 12, 132–133 middle class in, 92 migration to, 173 as new consumer city, 37–38 in 19th century, 28 objection to densification in, 199 opposition to development priorities in, 13 population of, 52, 115 post-familialism in, 128 reinvention of city center in, 31 safety of, 166–167 subsidized housing in, 12 as transactional city, 32 as wealthy city, 52 Ng Sai-leung, 101 Nicolaides, Becky, 146 Nijman, Jan, 64 Nisbet, Robert, 125 Norquist, John, 161 North Africa, 138 North America birth rates in, 15 glamour zones in, 81 infrastructure of, 67 living conditions in industrial cities in, 28 middle class move to periphery, 116 renovation of cities in, 60 Singaporean immigrants from, 99 North Hempstead, New York, 177 Norway, 118 O Oakland, 156 Obudho, Robert, 76 Obudho, Rose, 76 Ogden, Utah, 126 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 29, 46, 176 Ong, Andrew, 131 Orange, California, 177 Orange County, 46, 185 Organic growth, 73, 199–200 Orwell, George, 146 Osaka, 51, 196 Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto, 52, 153 Owen, David, 10 Ozment, Steven, 114 P Pakistan, 126 Panama, 53 Pant, Vatsala, 70 Paris appeal of, 22 dispersion in, 28–29, 154, 155 foreign-born population of, 97 global influence of, 82 homogenization of, 106 housing prices in, 41 as imperial city, 24 of Napoleon III, 29 in 19th century, 28 population of, 52, 155 post-familialism in, 118 renovation of, 59, 116 suburbs of, 143, 159 traffic in, 187 as wealthy city, 52 Park, Robert, 21 Parks, 46 Patavinus, Titus Livius (Livy), 23 Pearce, Fred, 122–123 Pearce, Nick, 172 Pelton, Joseph, 187–188 Perth, 159 Peru, 53 “Peter Pan” effect, 131 Peter the Great, 23 Petrograd, 33 Pfeiffer, Deirdre, 157 Philadelphia, 149 Phoenix, 152, 287n140 Piiparinen, Richey, 173 Pilot, Frederick, 188 Pittsburgh, 173, 196 Planet of Cities (Angel), 14 Planned communities, 30–31, 176–177 Please Look After Mom (Shin), 123 Plutonomy, 39–40 Polycentricity, 9 Population, estimating, 270n18 The Population Bomb (Ehrlich), 194 Population centres, 269n5 Population growth among seniors, 181 as cause of sprawl, 2 in cities, 51 (See also individual cities) density as natural contraceptive against, 9–10 in developing countries, 50 at end of 19th century, 115 slowdown of, 194–196 in suburbs, 154 Porter, Douglas, 165 Portland, 42, 134, 157, 173, 184 Post-familialism, 116–140 and aging population, 122–125 and changing sexual mores, 128–130 cultural influence of, 130–132 and dissolution of family ties, 134–136 eastern Asian, 119–122 emergence of, 116–117 European, 117–119 housing affordability in, 133–134 Japanese, 121–122 need for migrants to, 136–139 new value system in, 125–126 and restoration of familialism, 139–140 Seoul, 120–121 and urban form, 132–133 “urban tribes” in, 127–128 Poverty children living in, 32 in core cities, 159 in developing world, 169–170 growing concentration of, 42 in India, 65 in industrial cities, 27 in London, 94 and modern megacities, 61–62 in New York city, 97 in suburbs, 159–160 in Tokyo, 95 Prague, 162 Producer cities, 25–26 Productivity agricultural, 73, 115, 193, 194 of large cities, 8 Prosperity, density and, 54–56 Providence, 12 Provo, 9, 126 Public spaces, 163 Public transit, 187 Pulte, 183 Pune, India, 74 Purpose of cities, 2, 5–18 affordability and density, 11–12 and childlessness, 15–16 core cities, 17 cult of density, 6–8 economic, 8–9 environmental advantages, 9–11 and human scale, 12–14 and life stages, 16–18 and trend toward dispersion, 14–15 Putin, Vladimir, 139 Putnam, Robert, 135 Q Quality of life, 65–67 R Race, 42, 156–160 Radburn, New Jersey, 30 Rajaratnam, S., 104 Raleigh, 9, 46 Raleigh-Durham, 185 The Randstad, 81 Raymond, André, 60 Redefining cities, 2 Rees, Philip, 158 Religion in ancient cities, 21–22 in Dutch cities, 26 and familialism, 113, 114 in imperial cities, 23 spread by Chinese, 85 and trend toward secularism, 125–126 Renn, Aaron, 22, 186 Rents, 174 Reston, Virginia, 177 Retro-urbanism, 7 on climate change, 189–190 on cost of city living, 11–12 on decline of suburbia, 152 on economic purpose of cities, 8–9 on environmental advantages, 9–11 and impact of life stages, 165 as moral imperative, 10 on suburbanism, 162, 163 Richardson, Harry, 187 Richmond, 186 Richmond Hill (Canada), 158 Riedl, Marc, 65–66 Rio de Janeiro, 53, 73 Riverside, Illinois, 176 Riverside-San Bernardino, 159 Rogers, Richard, 148 Romania, 138 Rome, 22, 187 Rome, ancient, 23–24, 56–57, 85, 113 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 150 Rosenfeld, Michael, 128 Rotterdam, 154 Rural economies, 50 Rurbanization, 76 Russia, 55, 98, 139, 194–195 Rust Belt cities, 173 Rybczynski, Witold, 41 S Sa’at, Alfian, 99 Sacramento, 159 Sacred space, 21–23 Safety, 166–167 Saint Petersburg, 23, 33, 59 Salt Lake City, 126, 186 San Antonio, 152 San Diego, 152 San Francisco childlessness in, 117 children in, 16 decreased diversity in, 42 family households in, 144 financial jobs in, 186 as global city, 84 high-tech-related businesses in, 8 housing market in, 101–102 income spent on rent in, 174 loss of racial/ethnic diversity in, 157 as luxury-oriented city, 40 micro-apartments in, 132–133 post-familialism in, 128 racial income inequality in, 156–157 reinvention of city center in, 31 same-sex couple households in, 179 scenery of, 38 suburban inequality around, 159 as transactional city, 32 San Francisco Bay Area, 274n16 construction costs in, 11–12 foreign housing investments in, 101 global influence of, 81–83 housing bubble in, 134 as “necessary” region, 83–84 Sanitation, 68–69, 116 San Mateo County, 8 Santa Clara, California, 184 Santa Monica, 166 São Paulo, 13, 68, 69, 73 Sassen, Saskia, 80 Saunders, Pete, 41–42 Scandinavia, 136 Schama, Simon, 27 Schill, Mark, 96–97 Scruton, Roger, 146 Seaside, Florida, 161 Seattle children in, 16 decreased diversity in, 42 density of, 183 housing bubble in, 134 loss of racial/ethnic diversity in, 157 micro-apartments in, 132–133 micro-units in, 12 as “necessary” city, 84 scenery of, 38 Secularism, 125 Segregation, 156 Self, Will, 13 Sellers, Charles, 148 Sellers, Christopher, 191 Seneca, 109 Seoul colonialism in, 60 cultural district in, 107 fertility rate in, 16 growth of, 51, 176 and immigration, 87 as political power center, 25 post-familialism in, 119–121 traffic in, 187 Seoul-Incheon, 52 Sexual mores, 128–130 Shanghai, 25, 87 dispersion in, 155 foreign housing investments in, 100 as global city, 90–92 housing prices in, 175 and immigration, 87 micro-apartments in, 132–133 population of, 74 post-familialism in, 119–120 Sharma, R.


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

Firmin DeBrabander, “What If Green Products Make Us Pollute More?” 6. Ibid. 7. Michael Mehaffy, “The Urban Dimensions of Climate Change.” 8. David Owen, Green Metropolis, 48, 104. 9. A Convenient Remedy, Congress for the New Urbanism video. 10. Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis, 189. 11. The study was prepared by Jonathan Rose Associates, March 2011. 12. New Urban Network, “Study: Transit Outperforms Green Buildings.” 13. Kaid Benfield, “EPA Region 7: We Were Just Kidding About That Sustainability Stuff.” 14. Ibid. 15. Dom Nozzi, http://domz60.wordpress.com/quotes/. 16. Owen, 19, 23. 17.

Surface Transportation Policy Project Progress VII: 2 (March 1998): 5, 7. Kuang, Cliff. “Infographic of the Day: How Bikes Can Solve Our Biggest Problems.” Co.Design, 2011. fastcodesign.com/1665634/infographic-of-the-day-how-bikes-can-solve-our-biggest-problems. Langdon, Philip. “Parking: A Poison Posing as a Cure.” New Urban News, April/May 2005. _____. “Young People Learning They Don’t Need to Own a Car.” New Urban News, December 2009. Lehrer, Jonah. “A Physicist Solves the City.” The New York Times Magazine, December 17, 2010. Leinberger, Christopher B. “Federal Restructuring of Fannie and Freddie Ignores Underlying Cause of Crisis.” Urban Land, February 1, 2011. _____.

LECTURES AND CONFERENCES Brooks, David. Lecture. Aspen Institute, March 18, 2011. Frank, Lawrence. Lecture to the 18th Congress for the New Urbanism, Atlanta, Georgia, May 20, 2010. Gladwell, Malcolm. Remarks. Downtown Partnership of Baltimore Annual Meeting, November 17, 2010. Hales, Charles. Presentation at Rail-Volution, October 18, 2011. Livingstone, Ken. Winner commentary by Mayor of London. World Technology Winners and Finalists, World Technology Network, 2004. Parolec, Daniel. Presentation to the Congress for the New Urbanism, June 2, 2011. Ronkin, Michael. “Road Diets.” PowerPoint presentation, New Partners for Smart Growth, February 10, 2007.


pages: 232 words: 60,093

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities by Witold Rybczynski

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

In the 1980s, the planning ideas of Raymond Unwin and John Nolen resurfaced as what came to be called New Urbanism. New Urbanism started in the 1980s with Seaside, not a garden suburb but a tiny resort village on the Florida Panhandle. Seaside had an influence far beyond its small size. American home buyers were attracted by the picturesque, traditional architecture; developers, who generally paid little attention to design, took note of the financial success. The chief lessons of New Urbanism were that home buyers value planning and design and will accept higher densities when these are associated with a sense of community. The garden suburb returns as New Urbanism in a planned community in Orlando, Florida.

Gans, “City Planning and Urban Realities,” Commentary 33 (1962): 173. 17. Ibid., 172. 18. Ibid. 19. Jacobs, Death and Life, 391. 20. Vincent Scully, “The Architecture of Community,” in The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, ed. Peter Katz (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 221. 21. Martin Meyerson et al., The Face of the Metropolis (New York: Random House, 1968), 23. 22. Andrejs Skaburskis, “New Urbanism and Sprawl: A Toronto Case Study,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 25 (2006): 233. Chapter 6: Arcades and Malls, Big Boxes and Lifestyle Centers 1. Nicolas Brazier, Histoire des petits théâtres de Paris (Paris: Allardin, 1838),105. 2.

Monumental groups of government buildings appeared in state capitals in Colorado, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In an early—though more successful—version of what would later be called “urban renewal,” downtown beautification schemes were undertaken in Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. A host of new urban college campuses—Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Rice in Houston, Southern Methodist in Dallas, California Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, the University of Colorado in Boulder, and the Army War College in Washington, D.C.—were planned along City Beautiful lines. Monumental train stations were built in New York, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.


pages: 415 words: 119,277

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

I define my identity in terms of the same subjective kind of authenticity that Jane Jacobs admires, while seeing that it displaces the poor by constructing the habitus, latte by latte, of the new urban middle class. This self-awareness doesn’t deny that tastes reinforce social distinctions. I like traditional, small food shops with moderate prices, but I don’t shop at dollar stores or bodegas. Yet the means of consumption on which the new urban middle class depends are destroying the city of the working class. Our pursuit of authenticity—our accumulation of this kind of cultural capital—fuels rising real estate values; our rhetoric of authenticity implicitly endorses the new, post-Jacobs rhetoric of upscale growth.

During the past thirty years, though, media images of cities and neighborhoods have forged an increasingly important connection between capital, state, and the new urban middle class, between the interests of investors, officials, and consumers. The sociologist Leslie Sklair calls culture the “glue” that connects state power and financial capital; it’s clear that media images and consumer tastes anchor today’s technology of power in our individual yearnings, persuading us that consuming the authentic city has everything to do with aesthetics and nothing to do with power.11 The new urban middle class has led the way to a form of consumption that is both motivational and aspirational and feeds into the political and economic motors of urban change.

The fertile urban terroir of cultural creation is being destroyed by the conspicuous displays of wealth and power typical of private developers and public officials who build for the rich and hope benefits will trickle down to the poor, by the promotions of the media who translate neighborhood identity into a brand, and by the tastes of new urban middle classes who are initially attracted to this identity but ultimately destroy it. These forces of redevelopment have smoothed the uneven layers of grit and glamour, swept away traces of contentious history, cast doubt on the idea that poor people have a right to live and work here too—all that had made the city authentic.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

“Technology is not part of our mission,” explained Chris Osgood, a veteran civil servant who previously worked for New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation and who, as Jacob’s cochair, made up the other half of the Office of New Urban Mechanics. “It is to connect people and government better.” Consider Boston’s approach to the snow problem, as compared to Chicago or New York. Just as those cities were opening up their snowplow maps in January 2012, New Urban Mechanics launched “Adopt-A-Hydrant,” a Web app that allowed neighborhood volunteers to claim local fireplugs as their own winter wards. On top of responding to over five thousand fires each year, the Boston Fire Department is responsible for shoveling out over thirteen thousand hydrants after every major snowstorm.

As Jacob explained to me later, in August 2012 he had taken on a new role advising his peers in several other American cities on how to replicate the success of the Office of New Urban Mechanics. Philadelphia, the first to come knocking “actually called and asked ‘Can we just franchise what you guys do?’ ” Jacob proudly said.53 He was also working to help spread to other cities some of the projects kick-started in Boston. One such tool, Community PlanIt, was an online game designed by Eric Gordon, a visual and media arts professor at Emerson College, to enhance the value of community meetings. When we spoke, Community PlanIt had been successfully rolled out in two of Boston’s suburbs as well as Detroit. Although it was poised to go viral, can New Urban Mechanics survive a change of leadership at home in Boston?

It wasn’t helping much, and by the summer of 2011, the Boston Globe turned the screws on Mayor Menino, running a series of scathing articles bashing the entire school assignment scheme.19 Schools were central to Menino’s quality of life focus, and he made it clear to schools officials that something had to be done to address the problem quickly—“they got a very clear message from parents and the mayor,” according to Jacob.20 The Office of New Urban Mechanics stepped in, tasking one of its Code for America fellows to build a better tool for assessing school options. The result, a web app called Discover BPS, allowed parents to browse and sort a map of eligible schools that took into account all of the nagging and complex details of school selection, like a sibling’s current school assignment. Discover BPS was a big win for both Code for America and the Office of New Urban Mechanics’ approach to innovation. The entire project, built by one fellow with assistance from two others, took less than four months from start to finish—an almost instant response, compared to the traditional way cities buy software.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“the reach of global capital”: Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996), 100. a New York Times investigation found that 50 percent: Julie Satow, “Pied-à-Neighborhood,” New York Times, October 24, 2014. They came to New York to be artists, activists, authors: For more on consumption explanations of gentrification, including a discussion of sociologist Daniel Bell and economist Richard Florida, see Lees, Slater, and Wyly, Gentrification, ch. 3; for more on production explanations, see ch. 2. “As part of the experience of postwar suburbanization”: Smith, New Urban Frontier, xxiii–xiv.

Bushwick Daily, June 26, 2014. “Having produced a scarcity of capital”: Smith, New Urban Frontier, 23. By funding the construction of roads outside cities: John Hansan, “WPA: The Works Progress Administration,” Social Welfare History Project, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2013, socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/great-depression/wpa-the-works-progress-administration. Between 1977 and 1984, there were 130 such conversions: Lees, Slater, and Wyly, Gentrification, 29. “gentrification is a back-to-the-city movement”: Smith, New Urban Frontier, 70. “Though the majority of residents may never contemplate”: Quoted in Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 15.

technology, talent, and tolerance: For a good summary of Florida’s “technology, talent, and tolerance” approach to economic development, see Hazel Borys, “Richard Florida on Technology, Talent, and Tolerance,” Place Makers, November 18, 2013. The original edition sold 300,000 copies: Andres Viglucci, “Miami Now Winter Home to ‘Creative-Class’ Thinker Richard Florida,” Miami Herald, August 19, 2012. The Congress for New Urbanism held its 2016 conference: 24th Annual Congress for the New Urbanism, June 8–11, 2016, Detroit, Michigan, www.cnu.org/cnu24/schedule. “One problematic consequence [of the rise of the creative class]”: Florida, Rise of the Creative Class, 193, 227. “We need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline”: Richard Florida, “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” The Atlantic, March 2009.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

Shanghai, whose growth was frozen for decades by Maoist policies of deliberate underurbanization, could have as many as 27 million residents in its huge estuarial metro-region. Mumbai (Bombay), meanwhile, is projected to attain a population of 33 million, although no one knows whether such gigantic concentrations of poverty are biologically or ecologically sustainable.10 The exploding cities of the developing world are also weaving extraordinary new urban networks, corridors, and hierarchies. In the Americas, geographers already talk about a leviathan known as the Rio/Sao Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region (RSPER) which includes the medium-sized cities on the 500-kilometer-long transport axis between Brazil's two largest metropolises, as well as the important industrial area dominated by Campinas; with a current population of 37 million, this embryonic megalopolis is already larger than TokyoYokohama.11 Likewise, the giant amoeba of Mexico City, already having consumed Toluca, is extending pseudopods that will eventually incorporate much of central Mexico, including the cities of Cuernavaca, Puebla, Cuautla, Pachuca, and Queretaro, into a single megalopolis with a mid-twenty-first-century population of approximately 50 million — about 40 percent of the national total.12 Even more surprising is the vast West African conurbation rapidly coalescing along the Gulf of Guinea with Lagos (23 million people by 9 UN-HABITAT Urban Indicators Database (2002). 10 Far Eastern Economic Review, Asia 1998 Yearbook, p. 63. 11 Hamilton Tolosa, "The Rio/Sao Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region: A Quest for Global Integration," The Annals of "Regonal Science 31:2 (September 2003), pp. 480, 485. 12 Gustavo Garza, "Global Economy, Metropolitan Dynamics and Urban Policies in Mexico," Cities 16:3 (1999), p. 154. 2015 according to one estimate) as its fulcrum.

continuous urban corridor stretching from Japan/North Korea to West Java."17 As it takes shape over the next century, this great dragon-lice sprawl of cities will constitute the physical and demographic culmination of millennia of urban evolution. The ascendency of coastal East Asia, in turn, will surely promote a Tokyo—Shanghai "world city" dipole to equality with the New York—London axis in the control of global flows of capital and information. The price of this new urban order, however, will be increasing inequality within and between cities of different sizes and econo ic specializations. Chinese experts, indeed, are currently debating whether the ancient income-and-development chasm between city and count yside is now being replaced by an equally fundamental gap between small, particularly inland cities and the giant coastal metropolises.18 However, the smaller cities are precisely where most of Asia will soon live.

Before the Second World War, most poor urban Latin Americans lived in inner-city rental housing, but in the late 1940s import-substitution industrialization spurred a dramatic wave of squatter invasion on the outskirts of Mexico City and other Latin American cities. In response to the burgeoning of shantytowns, authorities in several countries, ardently supported by the urban middle classes, launched massive crackdowns on informal settlement. Since many of the new urban immigrants were indigenistas or descendants of slaves, there was often a racial dimension to this "war on squatting." The postwar dictator of Venezuela, Marcos Perez Jimenez, was a particularly notorious enemy of informal housing. According to three UCLA authors: "[His] government's solution to the fem'wwas the bulldozer.


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

Finally, we have learned from both the Financial District and Bushwick (as we did from Sheffield) that the relative importance of travel time compared to other commodities is increasing as the years go by. To repeat the succinct aphorism of the Bushwick real estate broker, “These days, convenience trumps aesthetics.” This is likely to become even more important as a new urban generation emerges. It is an idea we will continue to pursue in the remaining chapters of the book. CHAPTER FOUR THE NEW SUBURBIA IT MAY SEEM FAR-FETCHED to compare the Hispanic construction workers of modern suburban Atlanta to the peasants from southern France who built Baron Haussmann’s Parisian boulevards.

The suburban retrofits are, despite the number of examples that multiply every year, in only the earliest stages. But if urbanized suburbia is going to be the answer for this generation, or even a large part of it, density—somewhere—is the only real choice. DENSITY HAS BEEN, in many ways, the principal theme of New Urbanism, the movement that is now two decades old and has had a profound if not quite revolutionary impact on the shape of cities all over the Western world. In 1990, the New Urbanists were a small, close-knit coterie of architects and planners with a simple and heretical message: The automobile, and four decades of building homes, streets, and suburbs for the automobile’s convenience, had drained American places of the community and intimacy that human beings naturally desire.

Recapturing the attractiveness and livability of the traditional American city would require an effort to convince millions of suburbanites and a rising millennial generation that density was nothing to be afraid of. It was the way to live a life of sociability that placed walking at the center of the urban experience. Many public officials and planning professionals were first introduced to the principles of New Urbanism through the vehicle of lectures and slide shows documenting the ugliness of suburban sprawl and the intelligence of urban design as practiced in many places in the preautomobile era. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Peter Calthorpe, and a handful of coconspirators carried these slides to countless audiences all over the country in the early and mid-1990s.


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

Atlanta winters are mild; springtime explodes with daffodils, azaleas, and dogwoods; and the autumn is long and mellow. Atlanta offers diversity in all senses of the word. It is a troubled, dynamic, appealing, contradictory city, and the BeltLine project has the potential to envelope it with a livable new urbanism where people can walk and bike, enjoy parks, and get around on streetcars (or bus rapid transit) and rapid transit. The BeltLine will link to new urban farms whose fresh food can contribute to better health, along with an active lifestyle. As an Atlanta native with a profound personal involvement with the city, I now live far away in northern Vermont. Yet I have continued to monitor the problems and progress of my birthplace through the years as I have returned to visit family and friends, as well as to research two other Atlanta-related books (For God, Country, and Coca-Cola and Inside the Outbreaks).

Unless Atlanta can reposition itself—no longer perceived as a congested, sprawling, auto-dependent area—it risks slowly dissolving into an amorphous urban shell, leaving isolated communities powerless to attract business, fix infrastructure, solve huge health problems, or resolve racial prejudice and income inequity. Atlanta is not alone in its attempts to adjust to new urban realities. In the era of the automobile, American cities evolved into places that inadvertently made lives more harried and less healthy. Inner cities decayed. People sat in cars rather than biking or walking. Junk food was cheaper and easier to find than fresh fruit and vegetables. The “edge cities” surrounding the urban core, accessible only by automobile, leeched life and business from traditional downtowns.

They share the trail and the city with people of all shades and ethnicities—African Americans, whites, Hispanics, Koreans, Bosnians, Somalis, gays, straights, pensioners, children. They ride past some of the wealthiest as well as some of the poorest city neighborhoods, though all property near the BeltLine has gone up in value, as more people move into the corridor. Despite many unanticipated setbacks, Atlanta is already realizing this vision straight out of the “new urbanism” playbook.* The NuGrape building, headquarters for the soda pop company from 1937 through 1971, has indeed been converted into high-ceilinged lofts, and residents really do sit out on the former loading dock on summer nights. The Historic Fourth Ward Park, with its nearby skateboard area, was finished in 2011, and the massive old Sears warehouse on Ponce de Leon Avenue is now the Ponce City Market, a combined retail, residential, and commercial space.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Longworth’s cogent ‘On Global Cities’, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 21 May 2005, <https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/publication/global-cities>. 45 Findings are throughout Richard Florida’s The New Urban Crisis. 46 Melkorka Licea, ‘“Poor door” tenants of luxury tower reveal the financial apartheid within’, New York Post, 17 January 2016, <http://nypost.com/2016/01/17/poor-door-tenants-reveal-luxury-towers-financial-apartheid/>. 47 Milanovic, Global Inequality. 48 Florida, The New Urban Crisis, p. 41. 49 Ibid, p. 38. 50 Cowen, The Complacent Class, p. 7. 51 Florida, The New Urban Crisis, p. 216. 52 Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (Basic Books, New York, 2015 (ebook)). 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Lawrence Mishel, ‘Entry-level workers’ wages fell in lost decade’, Economic Policy Institute report, 7 March 2012, <http://www.epi.org/publication/ib327-young-workers-wages/>. 56 Baldwin, The Great Convergence. 57 William J.

Until recently, he believed they would be the engine rooms of the new economy, embracing the diversity necessary to attract talent. That has certainly happened. Gay pride parades seem to get larger every year. A thousand multicultural flowers are blooming. Yet in squeezing out income diversity, the new urban economies are also shutting off the scope for serendipity. The West’s global cities are like tropical islands surrounded by oceans of resentment. Florida’s latest book is called The New Urban Crisis. Rather than being shaped by those who live there full-time, the characters of our biggest cities are increasingly driven by the global super-rich as a place to park their money. Many of the creative classes are being edged out.

The number of unoccupied apartments in New York rose by almost three-quarters at the turn of the century to thirty-four thousand in 2011.49 London has witnessed similar growth. The new residents then lock in their gains by restricting land use, which keeps values high. Richard Florida calls them the ‘new urban Luddites’, who exploit an ‘enormous and complex thicket of zoning laws and other land use regulations’ to keep the others out. Tyler Cowen has coined a new acronym to replace Nimbys (Not in My Backyard): Bananas (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).50 Such risk aversion breeds its own failure.


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

One of three new municipal cemeteries created outside Paris in 1803, Père-Lachaise lay to the east of the city, at Mont-Louis, and was built on the estate of François d’Aix de La Chaise, who had been King Louis XIV’s confessor. The French described it as an ‘anglo-chinois’ garden cemetery, for, like many of the new urban parks that would soon grace European and American cities, it was inspired by the naturalism of both Chinese imperial parks and English landscape gardens. Its tree-lined walks and picturesque views impressed everyone, including an American visitor in the 1830s who observed that ‘it is impossible to visit this vast sanctuary of the dead, where the rose and the cypress encircle each tomb, and the arborvitae and eglantine shade the marble obelisk, without feeling a solemn yet sweet and soothing emotion steal over the senses’.67 In time, the hill in Père-Lachaise became a famous vantage point from which to view the city.

Some sixty thousand people a year went to New York City’s Green-Wood Cemetery (1838) and enjoyed a scenic tour among its monuments and the views across Upper New York Bay.71 Guidebooks directed people to the most scenic routes and inspiring vistas. Cemeteries had become part of a new ‘national culture’, one created by ‘the new urban citizens of America’.72 Among their winding, leafy paths, people forgot the habitual cares and troubles of the city and their thoughts turned to more profound matters, such as the meaning of life and human mortality. In the twentieth century, the memorial park became the preferred burial ground for an increasingly suburban nation.

In Paris, for example, it has been estimated that 10 per cent of the city’s residents are ‘urban nomads’, part-time city dwellers who come for the cultural events that only a big city can support – opera, theatre, art exhibitions as well as international sporting events and conferences.28 Cities have changed significantly over the last century and downtown is not the place it used to be. People no longer commute en masse to the downtown, and neither do they do their shopping exclusively there. Thanks to new transport and communication technologies, cities have become amorphous structures, with new urban centres emerging on the peripheries amidst the ubiquitous suburban sprawl. ‘In its present incarnation,’ writes Deyan Sudjic, ‘the old centre is just another piece on the board, a counter that has perhaps the same weight as the airport, or the medical centre, or the museum complex. They all swim in a soup of shopping malls, hypermarkets and warehouses, drive-in restaurants and anonymous industrial sheds, beltways and motorway boxes.’29 This is the age of the Edge City and ‘the hundred-mile city’, where the old distinctions between urban and suburban are being demolished and the central city is being eclipsed by the new, expanding ‘exopolis’.30 But downtown has not disappeared as some predicted.


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Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays by Witold Rybczynski

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", additive manufacturing, airport security, Buckminster Fuller, City Beautiful movement, classic study, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Jane Jacobs, kremlinology, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Eisenman, rent control, Silicon Valley, the High Line, urban renewal, young professional

Create avenues linking two large neighborhood squares. Replace the two large schools with several smaller elementary schools. The carefully crafted project of the winning team is representative of a current approach to urban design that has been termed neo-traditional but whose adherents prefer to call it New Urbanism. New Urbanism represents a turning away from the principles that have characterized American urban design since the 1950s and a rediscovery of the virtues of traditional, gridded streets scaled to the pedestrian and of cities that integrate a diversity of urban uses—commercial and industrial as well as residential—rather than being zoned according to single functions.

So far, the accomplishments of architects and planners like Peter Calthorpe, Daniel Solomon, and Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have been predominantly suburban and aimed at an upper-middle-class clientele, but the commercial successes of New Urbanism are evidence of its broad appeal to consumers and developers alike. It seems appropriate that such a mainstream, pragmatic approach should be applied to the remedial design of public housing. An appealing feature of New Urbanism is architectural design whose flavor is regional rather than international. In Nelson, Faulkner, and Carcoana’s proposal, moreover, the traditional design approach means that public and private housing are indistinguishable.

They are near recreational amenities like lakes and mountains. They have strong local economies and have lower unemployment, poverty, and crime rates than the national average. But Raleigh-Durham, Rochester, and Provo-Orem are not merely examples of successful small cities. They are also examples of a new urban trend: the rise of what might be called the college city. The college town is an American institution. Throughout the nineteenth century, it was common practice to locate private colleges in small towns like Amherst in Massachusetts, Middlebury in Vermont, and Claremont in California. The idea was that bucolic surroundings would provide the appropriate atmosphere for the pursuit of learning and (not incidentally) remove students from the distractions and temptations of the big city.


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

We got to talking about what made this place tick and, by extension, how one would go about building it anew someplace else. It was something he’d thought about before briefing visting members of Parliament on how they might go about rehabbing Heathrow. “ ‘New Urbanism’ is a funny term, because it’s really the old urbanism,” he said. “Peter [Calthorpe] would tell you you can have New Urbanism anywhere.” And so would Gleason’s boss, Jon Ratner. The youngest member of the Ratner clan is arguably its most radical. Having started work at Stapleton in his twenties, he’d since risen to the post of director of sustainability, in charge of the firm’s triple bottom line: “people, planet, and profit.”

Kasarda believes he holds the blueprints to a fix that is beautiful, efficient, and ultimately sustainable—a far cry from the hideous, haphaz-ard, and polluted messes most cities have inherited. He has made it his mission to imbue Airworld’s geography of nowhere with a sense of place. There is no better place to start building this New Urbanism than in Denver, whose hub is the cleanest slate. What will these cities look like, and where should we look for a model? The answer, I discovered, would be Stapleton’s redemption. Would You Be Mine, Could You Be Mine, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? The deal struck to shutter Stapleton and erect its successor depended on a decade of city, county, and state approvals, followed by voter referendums, bond issues, cost overruns, and a voracious robotic baggage system craving Samsonites.

Over time, Reunion will connect people through lasting friendships and, in the process, create a place where each resident will pursue happiness in his or her own way. Which makes Reunion something entirely new, a community specifically created for the pursuit of happiness.” Which turned out to be the problem. The accompanying manifesto touts four precepts. The first and most important is the “New Suburbanism,” a deliberate echo (and subversion) of the New Urbanism first practiced by the architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. They built cities you could walk in— neighborhoods with schools and shops, parks and offices, homes and apartments all mixed together and connected by leafy streets and boulevards instead of access roads and parking lots.


Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

Jennifer Hochschild and John Mollenkopf, “Understanding Immigrant Political Incorporation through Comparison,” in Bringing Outsiders In, 303–4. This paragraph draws on John Mollenkopf and Raphael Sonenshein, “The New Urban Politics of Integration,” in Bringing Outsiders In, 75–7. Ibid., 91. John Mollenkopf and Raphael Sonenshein, “New York and Los Angeles: Government and Political Influence,” in New York and Los Angeles, ed. David Halle and Andrew Beveridge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 145, table 5.5. Ibid. Mollenkopf and Sonenshein, “The New Urban Politics of Integration,” in Bringing Outsiders In, 75. Patricia Pessar and Pamela Graham, “Dominicans: Transnational Identities and Local Politics,” in New Immigrants in New York, ed.

Nancy Foster (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 264. Mollenkopf and Sonenshein, “The New Urban Politics of Integration,” in Bringing Outsiders In, 76. Ibid. While isolated examples of Black councillors elected in Los Angeles can be traced back to 1915, a consistent pattern of Blacks elected councillors started after 1965. John H. Laslett, “Historical Perspectives: Immigration and the Rise of a Distinctive Urban Region, 1900–1970,” in Ethnic Los Angeles, ed. Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), 68. Mollenkopf and Sonenshein, “The New Urban Politics of Integration,” in Bringing Outsiders In, 75.

The technological, economic, and social changes of the late twentieth century have made the urban structure malleable. Cities have spread out, suburbs have grown into veritable cities, shopping malls have realigned the commercial order, and the electronic revolution has drastically diminished the resistance of distance. These changes have realigned the urban structure and given rise to new urban theories. The Los Angeles school of urbanism projects Los Angeles as the model of a post-modern city, lacking a strong centre. It views the city to be cellular in structure, divided into autonomous places by function, culture, and location. It envisages the growth impulse to work from the outside to the central core, reversing the conventional view.


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City: Urbanism and Its End by Douglas W. Rae

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business climate, City Beautiful movement, classic study, complexity theory, creative destruction, desegregation, edge city, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, informal economy, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, open immigration, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Works Progress Administration

This dramatic assertion of City Hall’s authority met with summary rejection in court, and the strike precipitated the loss of the city’s major remaining industrial base. I carry a few major strands of economic and social and political change right up to the present in order to show what is meant by urbanism’s ending. The third and last resonance of the term “urbanism” attaches to the vibrant recent movement that announced itself as the New Urbanism. Centering especially on the Miami design studio of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, this movement seeks to recapture the look, feel, and function of a more humane era. New Urbanist design encourages front porches, carefully rendered sidewalks, and scores of other details that evoke what this movement means by “urxviii P R E F A C E banism.”

And, too often, the end of urbanism has undermined that experience by promoting social homogeneity within municipalities, leading to the evolution of regional hierarchies in which “purified communities” (Richard Sennett’s term) bring likes together, 30 C R E AT I V E D E S T R U C T I O N safe from contact with persons different from themselves.71 In such regional hierarchies, or ladders, the bottom rung more often than not lies in the formerly working-class neighborhoods of central cities, where opportunity is scarce, danger is commonplace, and democracy in any plausible sense seems out of reach. The notion of urbanism provides a useful perspective for critical study of such hierarchies. Third, the New Urbanism school of design is among the most important movements afoot in our current debate on the future of American city life.72 This movement harks back to design patterns from what I am calling the urbanist era (in truth, that is, the old urbanism), and does so for reasons having everything to do with the desire to recapture urbanism’s power to order and govern social space humanely and well.

New Urbanist designs encourage public interaction, engagement, and grounded living through features such as open porches, which look very like features found in abundance in houses from about 1910. But design alone is apt not to suffice in isolation from other features. The extent to which the New Urbanism’s design strategy can be integrated with cultural, economic, and governmental requirements for success in real city neighborhoods remains largely for the future to decide. In pressing toward that future, urbanism becomes an idea around which a fresh vision may be formed. The old urbanism—the city of steam and manure—cannot be recaptured, and it would not suit our needs if it could be.


Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit, Susan Schwartzenberg

blue-collar work, Brownian motion, dematerialisation, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Loma Prieta earthquake, low skilled workers, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, pets.com, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave

For more on the LHotel struggle, see James Sobredo, "From Manila Bay to Daly City: Filipinos San Francisco," End March my brother David Solnit, a co-organizer of the tours, on the Reshaping San FranCD-ROM produced by Chris Carlsson and mentioned in Lucy Lippard's On the Beaten Track. cisco in Francisco, 13. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City 32. Brian Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition: The Making of San Francisco's Ethnic and Nonconformist Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988;, 177-78 18. Randy 19. Godfrey 20. San Francisco Bay Guardian, "Neighborhood issue 21 . Shilts, quoted in Godfrey, ibid., 121. ibid., 121. Profile: The Mission/Lofts and "The Economic Cleansing of San Francisco," October Neil Smith,Tfte New Urban Frontier, 32-33 7, 1998, 20. Lattes" in the special HOLLOW 176 CITY A Real Estate History 1.

This is part of is the what makes an urbanity worth celebrating, this braiding together of disparate lives, but the new gentri- Eviction Defense Network poster, Mission District, 1999, fication threatens to yank out some of the strands ing urbanism itself Perhaps the function like suburbs as those them over. In the new urbanism will altogether, diminish- result in old cities that who were suburbia's blandly privileged take postwar years, the white middle class fled cities, which created the crises of abandonment, scarce city revenue, and depression that defined urban trouble through the 1970s, but the poor and the bohe- mian who stuck those to cities often made something lively there anyway; now who once fled have come back and created an unanticipated crisis of wealth for those raised on the urban crisis of poverty.

Car-based suburbia has version of Utopia since the Second the gentrification of cities, been all central disci- take up ques- a particularly nowheresville World War, but the spread of chains, the ability of administrators to control increas- SAN FRANCISCO, CAPITAL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY and public ingly subtle details of public space urban places small towns, but country This is is location. ist t is happening a story about love in San Francisco and is remote to the afford those hotel cities and money. Or The new economy is as economy can what new New Urbanism in which a day, village it suddenly lands being cities love, we took city lost. across the money and economy as a tourthe campesinos in; rooms and drinks, and San Franciscans can't afford for granted vanish becomes more and more evident. People speak constantly, obsessively, of is about different fi"om the old San Franciscans' love for their mourn what Much has been function like suburbs.


pages: 395 words: 115,753

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

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

In his opinion, Oregonians were having “to find new ways of doing things: of making a living without destroying land, building real towns and city neighborhoods instead of tract housing pods and commercial strip smarm, [and] eliminating unnecessary car trips and commutes.”33 The Portland experience was also welcome news to an emerging planning movement known as the New Urbanism. Led by architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, New Urbanism was the planning arm of the antisprawl crusade, dedicated to creating traditional-style neighborhoods with smaller lots, narrower streets, front porches, and corner groceries. Density and walkability were to replace the sprawl and automobile dependence of the edgeless city. Basically, New Urbanists sought to recreate the neighborhoods of the pre-1945 era before Levittown, Southdale Center, McDonalds, and the interstate highway system had corrupted American life. In their manifesto on New Urbanism, Duany and Plater-Zyberk urged their followers to remember the refrain: “No more housing subdivisions!

The chief developer of festival marketplaces was James Rouse, the creator of the new town of Columbia, Maryland. “There’s a yearning for life at the heart of the city—a yearning for active places with personality and human scale,” Rouse contended.41 And through his festival marketplaces, he sought to give Americans a new urban heart and infuse the core with an upbeat personality. FIGURE 5.1 Ghirardelli Square enlivened the nighttime scene in central San Francisco. (San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library) The most notable of the festival marketplaces, and the one every city wanted to replicate, was Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace.

William McCord, John Howard, Bernard Friedberg, and Edwin Harwood, Life Styles in the Black Ghetto (New York: Norton, 1969), p. 60. For accounts of the Watts riots, see also Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), and David O. Sears and John B. McConahay, The Politics of Violence: The New Urban Blacks and the Watts Riot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). 58. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam, 1968), p. 39. 59. Hippler, Hunter’s Point, p. 206. 60. Report of Commission on Civil Disorders, p. 40. 61. Ibid., pp. 69, 164. 62. Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 160. 63.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Decades ago, the National Urban Coalition noted that urban revitalization programs generally produced some overall economic benefit for cities, but at the cost of “the deprivation, frustration and anger of those who are becoming the new urban serfs.”56 Today, big cities continue to draw the wealthy and the well-educated, with impoverished residents pushed to the margins, and little in between.57 The result is “rising inequality, deepening economic segregation, and increasingly unaffordable housing,” which Richard Florida describes as a “new urban crisis.”58 Some of those living in the cities outside the “glamour zone” feel trapped—victims of an urban system that doesn’t provide opportunity for them.

utm_source=Mic+Check&utm_campaign=2b200dd408-Thursday_July_167_15_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_51f2320b33-2b200dd408-285306781. 53 Katy Murphy, “The California Dream is tough to afford if you’re under 40,” Mercury News, February 21, 2018, https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/18/the-california-dream-is-tough-to-afford-if-youre-under-40/; Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, “Fading Promise: Millennial Prospects in the Golden State,” Center for Demographics and Policy, May 5, 2017, http://centerforcaliforniarealestate.org/publications/Kotkin-Fading-Dream-printable.pdf. 54 Center for Opportunity Urbanism, Beyond Gentrification. 55 John Aidan Byrne, “The Exodus of New York City’s endangered middle class,” New York Post, December 22, 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/12/22/the-exodus-of-new-york-citys-endangered-middle-class/; Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1962), 282. 56 National Urban Coalition, Displacement: City Neighborhoods in Transition, Washington, D.C., 1978. 57 Kristian Behrens and Frederic Robert-Nicoud, “Urbanization Makes the World More Unequal,” VoxEU, July 24, 2014, https://voxeu.org/article/inequality-big-cities. 58 Richard Florida, “Mapping the New Urban Crisis,” City Lab, April 13, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/new-urban-crisis-index/521037/; Patrick Sharkey, “Rich Neighborhood, Poor Neighborhood: How Segregation Threatens Social Mobility,” Brookings, December 5, 2013, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2013/12/05/rich-neighborhood-poor-neighborhood-how-segregation-threatens-social-mobility/. 59 Helen Raleigh, “Gentrification Provokes a Cofee Clash in Denver’s Five Points,” Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/gentrification-provokes-a-coffee-clash-in-denvers-five-points-1513983831; Cameron McWhirter, “Atlanta’s Growing Pains Are Getting Worse,” Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/atlantas-growing-pains-are-getting-worse-1535707800; Richard Campanella, “Gentrification and Its Discontents: Notes From New Orleans,” New Geography, February 28, 2013, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003526-gentrification-and-its-discontents-notes-new-orleans; “Google abandons Berlin base after two years of resistance,” Guardian, October 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/24/google-abandons-berlin-base-after-two-years-of-resistance; Chantal Braganza, “Why opponents of gentrification have taken to the streets of Hamilton,” TVO, April 5, 2018, https://tvo.org/article/current-afairs/why-opponents-of-gentrification-have-taken-to-the-streets-of-hamilton; David Streitfeld, “Protesters Block Google Buses in San Francisco, Citing ‘Techsploitation,’” New York Times, May 31, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/google-bus-protest.html?

Fifteen cities together hold roughly 11 percent of the planet’s total wealth.17 These “superstar cities” are becoming more bifurcated, with oligarchs and the upper clerisy living in the gentrified urban core, surrounded by propertyless and often impoverished masses on the periphery.18 The elite urban cores constitute only a small percentage of the metropolitan area both in the United States and in Europe. In France, over 60 percent of the population live in the increasingly neglected periphery—the suburbs, provincial cities and small towns, and rural areas.19 The new urban paradigm is what Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, famously labeled a “luxury city,” built around the preferences of his ultra-rich compadres.20 But within the dominant cities are clear divisions by class, education, and sometimes race. The wealthy live in safe, gentrified areas, while the poor and minority populations are mostly consigned to neglected peripheral neighborhoods.


pages: 432 words: 124,635

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

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

They called their movement the Congress for the New Urbanism—the name a cheeky reference and reaction to the CIAM—Congrès Internationaux d’architecture moderne—the fraternity formed by Le Corbusier and other European modernists in 1928. The New Urbanists were determined to undo the modernists’ work. They wrote a manifesto calling for compact, mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods of walkable street networks, with transit and attractive public spaces, all framed by buildings that responded to the local culture and climate. The Congress for the New Urbanism has now grown into a powerful movement with thousands of members.

I will call it the dispersed city, for the characteristic that defines almost every aspect of it. While the world’s architectural critics and so-called thought leaders tend to focus their attention on iconic structures and rare designs, the journey to the happy city must begin out here, in the landscape of the infinitely repeated form, on the plains of dispersal. For every new urban plaza, starchitect-designed tower, or sleek new light-rail network, there are a hundred thousand cul-de-sacs out in the dispersed city. This is the environment that, more than any other, defines how Americans and millions of people in wealthy cities across the globe move, live, work, play, and perceive the world, and how millions more will live if cities return to the trajectory they were on before the crash.

The region came to exhibit a classic case of what transportation analysts call induced traffic, a phenomenon in which new highway lanes invariably clog up with hundreds of thousands of cars driven by new drivers on their way to new neighborhoods fed by new road capacity, a tendency that creates entirely new traffic jams faster than the time it takes to finish paying off a new car.* The average time it takes for new urban highway capacity to fill up with new demand? Five to six years. Now, although it has bloated to twelve lanes in many sections, Atlanta’s Perimeter still grinds to a standstill during peak hours.* The driver who once prayed for congestion-easing highway lanes and got them is still stuck in traffic.


pages: 769 words: 169,096

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

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

But given the historical famines that plagued South and East Asia as recently as the twentieth century,20 it is quite understandable that a possible decrease in agricultural land raises concern. The Chinese government, alarmed by the fast pace of urban expansion, has set urban land development quotas that severely restrict the conversion of agricultural land into urban land. The National Plan on New Urbanization (2014–2020), published by the Government of China to guide urbanization until 2020, prescribes a minimum density of 100 people per hectare for every new urban settlement in order to preserve agricultural land. In addition, the use of costly conversion quotas is required for any urban expansion requiring the loss of cultivated land. Many observers of rapid urbanization in Asia are alarmed by the fact that cities’ land coverage expands at a faster pace than the urban population.

The main objective of this book is to improve operational urban planning, as practiced in municipal planning departments, by applying urban economists’ knowledge (and models) to the design and planning of regulations and infrastructure. Urban economists understand the functioning of markets, while planners are often baffled by them. Unfortunately, the very valuable knowledge that has accumulated in urban economics literature has not had much impact on operational urban planning. My aim is not to develop a new urban theory but to introduce already existing urban economics knowledge into urban planning practices. Urban Planning versus Urban Economics Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners must make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground. The width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, and the heights of buildings are usually based on planners’ decisions.

Once jobs have dispersed into a pattern similar to the dispersed model or composite model, it is unlikely that they will eventually concentrate again in a dense, central CBD. This path dependency16 rule, common to all evolving shapes, is a reality that should seriously limit the freedom of planners to dream up new urban forms. Planners should take into account the path dependency of city shapes when designing new transport systems, as we will see in chapter 5 on mobility. None of the three models discussed above are immutable. Future urban labor markets, for instance, might not require as many face-to-face interactions among employees, customers, and suppliers as they have in the past.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

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

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

But he also needed new financial institutions and debt instruments (the Crédit Mobilier and Immobilier). He helped resolve the capital surplus disposal problem in effect by setting up a Keynesian-style system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements. All of this entailed the co-evolution of a new urban way of life and a new kind of urban persona. Paris became ‘the city of light’, the great centre of consumption, tourism and pleasure. The cafés, the department stores (also brilliantly described in another Zola novel, The Ladies’ Paradise (1883)), the fashion industry, the grand expositions, the opera and the spectacle of court life all played their part in creating new profit opportunities through consumerism.

And it is not only in the advanced capitalist countries where this style of urbanisation can be found – you will find it in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and Mumbai as well as in almost every Asian city you can think of. Even the incoherent, bland and monotonous suburban tract development that continues to dominate in many parts of the world now gets its antidote through a ‘new urbanism’ movement that touts the sale of community (supposedly intimate and secure as well as often gated) and a supposedly ‘sustainable’ boutique lifestyle as a developer product to fulfil urban dreams. The impacts on political subjectivity have been huge. This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism and financial opportunism has become the template for human personality socialisation.

The darker side of surplus absorption through urban transformation entails, however, repeated bouts of urban restructuring through ‘creative destruction’. This highlights the significance of crises as moments of urban restructuring. It has a class dimension since it is usually the poor, the underprivileged and those marginalised from political power that suffer primarily from this process. Violence is often required to make the new urban geography out of the wreckage of the old. Haussmann tore through the old Parisian slums, using powers of expropriation for supposedly public benefit, doing so in the name of civic improvement, environmental restoration and urban renovation. He deliberately engineered the removal of much of the working class and other unruly elements, along with insalubrious industries, from Paris’s city centre, where they constituted a threat to public order, public health and, of course, political power.


pages: 252 words: 13,581

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City by Tony Roshan Samara

conceptual framework, deglobalization, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, illegal immigration, late capitalism, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, structural adjustment programs, unemployed young men, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, working poor

Neoliberal urban governance is the result of bundling these related security and development agendas into a coherent governance ideology and related set of practices in which so-called free markets provide guiding principles and reference points for ordering urban life. The situation in Cape Town mirrors that in other prominent cities in South Africa and beyond. In these cities, distinct interests have converged to produce a somewhat new urban reality in which pursuit of “world city” status establishes the basic constraints and possibilities for urban development.7 Cities in many countries have been cut loose from receding social welfare states—where one existed at all—and have been left to make their own way, so to speak, in the global economy as part of a neoliberal growth strategy pioneered in North America in the 1970s, marked by a sharpening of intercity competition for resources.

For those youth who do come into conflict with the law, either because they have committed a crime or because they are falsely arrested, the criminal justice system only exposes them to another round of trauma before they are released. The context in which so many children are brought into contact with the criminal justice system, or simply confronted with the force of urban security structures, is no longer racial apartheid, but a form of security governance that is rooted in a new urban politics, in which the transgressive presence of black youth remains central. In the next section we look at how neoliberal governance through urban revitalization of the city’s core contributes to this criminalization of black youth. Securing the Core: Street Children and Moral Panic in the Central Business District The city government of Cape Town has openly endorsed a market-driven approach to economic growth since at least the mid-1990s, over the objections of many urban residents and community organizations, and this commitment exercises a profound influence on urban governance.

We can therefore expect to see continual increases in public and private resources being channeled into forms of social control to fill the gaps left by ill-conceived renewal strategies and contain the poor within the peripheries of developed urban cores. By evoking the emotional issue of crime, a very real problem for Cape Town, an urban renewal agenda that serves a very narrow slice of the city’s population can introduce this new urban segregation under the guise of development. The response to street children in the CBD constitutes a moral panic that rearticulates race and class tensions in terms of threats to order and mobilizes resources (emotional, organizational, and financial) to confront these threats. That public and private security forces become central to the city’s response is far from surprising given that even under the best of circumstances, insufficient time has passed to overcome patterns that are more than a century old.


pages: 717 words: 150,288

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

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

, Journal for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology 3: 2, 2005, 12–17. 82 Deborah Cowen, ‘National Soldiers and the War on Cities’, Theory and Event 10: 2, 2007, 1. 83 See, for example, Siobhan Gorman, ‘Satellite-Surveillance Program to Begin Despite Privacy Concerns’, Wall Street Journal, 1 October 2008. 84 Max Manwaring, Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 2005 available at www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army mil. 85 David Murakami Wood and Jonathan Coaffee, ‘Security Is Coming Home: Rethinking Scale and Constructing Resilience in the Global Urban Response to Terrorist Risk, International Relations 20:4, 2006, 503. 86 Eyal Weizman, ‘Lethal theory’, LOG Magazine, April 2005, 53. 87 Jeremy Packer, ‘Becoming Bombs: Mobilizing Mobility in the War of Terror’, Cultural Studies 20: 4–5, 2006, 378. 88 The US Posse Comitas act, for example, which explicitly forbade the domestic deployment of US troops within the US mainland.

Maybe they cling to religion there.’54 Such a discourse camouflages the way in which the Republican Party has long been dominated by a cabal of billionaires, CEOs, and corporate and military lobbyists who have successfully shaped policy to subsidize their class interests while dramatically undermining services and subsidies for America’s working and lower-middle classes. VOICES OF THE CITY (JOURNAL) A flick through the pages of the United States’ leading ‘new urban right’ magazine the City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, intellectual architects of both George W. Bush’s neoconservatism and Giuliani’s right-wing ‘counter-revolution’ in 1990s New York, is telling.55 Celebrations of positive economic, cultural, political or social aspects of metropolitan mixing are absent here.

Eyal Weizman, for instance, has shown how certain Israeli generals have appropriated the radical, post-structuralist writings of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to fashion new military doctrine for taking and controlling the labyrinthine spaces of Palestinian refugee camps.102 Here, writes Weizman, ‘contemporary urban warfare plays itself out within a constructed, real or imaginary architecture, and through the destruction, construction, reorganization, and subversion of space’.103 By breaking through the linked walls of entire towns and thus creating paths, the Israeli military seeks to ‘create operational “space as if it had no borders”, neutralizing the advantages accorded by urban terrain to opponents of occupation’.104 Many of the new urban-warfare techniques used by state militaries – which Goonewardena and Kipfer label ‘colonization without occupation – are imitations of techniques of urban resistance used against state militaries in earlier centuries. ‘This non-linear, poly-nucleated and anti-hierarchical strategy of combat in urban areas’, they point out, ‘in fact plagiarises the tactics of the defenders of the Paris Commune, Stalingrad and the Kasbahs of Algiers, Jenin and Nablus’.105 Techniques of urban militarism and urbicidal violence serve to discipline or displace dissent and resistance.


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Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

What he did in effect was to help resolve the capital surplus disposal problem by setting up a Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements. The system worked very well for some fifteen years, and it entailed not only a transformation of urban infrastructures but the construction of a whole new urban way of life and the construction of a new kind of urban persona. Paris became "the city of light;' the great center of con­ sumption, tourism and pleasure-the cafes, the department stores, the fashion industry, the grand expositions all changed the urban way of life in ways that could absorb vast surpluses through crass consumerism (which offended traditionalists and excluded workers alike).

Shopping malls, multiplexes, and box stores proliferate (the production of each has become big business), as do fast-fo o d and artisanal market places, boutique cultures and, as Sharon Zukin slyly notes, "pacification by cap­ puccino." Even the incoherent, bland, and monotonous suburban tract development that continues to dominate in many areas, now gets its anti­ dote in a "new urbanism" movement that touts the sale of community and a boutique lifestyle as a developer product to fulfill urban dreams. This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense p ossessive indi­ vidualism can become the template for human personality so cialization. Th e impact is increasing individualistic isolation, anxiety, and neurosis in the midst of one of the gre atest so cial achievements (at least judging by its enormous scale and all-embracing character) ever constructed in human history for the realization of our hearts' desire.

It has entailed rep e ated bouts of urban restructuring through "creative destruction." Th is nearly always has a class dimension, since it is usually the poor, the underprivileged, and those m arginalized from political power that suffer first and foremost from this pro cess. Violence is required to achieve the new urban world on the wreckage of the old. H aussmann tore thro ugh the old Parisian impoverished quar­ ters, using powe rs of expropriation for supposedly public benefit, and did so in the name of civic improvement, environmental restoration , and urban renovation. He deliberately engineered the removal of much of the working class and other unruly elements, along with insalubrio us indus­ tries, from Paris's city center, where they constituted a threat to public order, public h ealth and, of co urse, political p ower.


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Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

You can’t just open part of a town when that town is supposed to seem like a preexisting “destination,” whose charm and attraction is based on its vibrancy and cohesiveness. The whole place needed to be activated at the same moment—every store leased, and as many apartments as possible rented in advance. Only then could the ribbon be cut, and Birkdale set into motion. Dunning is the first to admit that he bent the rules of New Urban-ism to fit the realities of his development situation. “Strict New Urbanism is dogmatically sustainable and ecologically friendly development. But there are market forces, developer mind-sets, retail mind-sets, and economic realities that don’t always merge easily with what we’d really like to happen,” he says. While Dunning first conceived Birkdale as a real residential community with a few small shops, its financiers required a level of funding that only big anchor stores could provide.

Towns like Birkdale—and there are a few dozen now in full swing—refocus people on how they’re living instead of just where they’re getting, and create destinations off the highway where the most jaded automotive suburbanites can get a taste of what it’s like to walk around outside with other people. Isn’t reconnecting to a fake town better than not connecting at all? Although the New Urbanism aesthete will deride the people of Birkdale for responding to the cues embedded in its absolutely planned and artificial re-creation of small-town life, where does such orthodoxy get us? Is Birkdale just a cynical application of watered-down New Urbanism to make the Gap look and feel more like a local business? Or does it help transform the otherwise alienating landscape of the suburbs into a healthier, more potentially social setting?

By the 1200s, technological developments such as water mills and windmills as well as increased travel and commerce led to the resurgence of towns and cities outside the lord’s direct control. Towns became centers for the manufacturing, exchange, and circulation of goods, and provided a stark contrast to the to-each-his-own way of life in the manors and villages. In their new urban setting serfs found legal freedom, opportunities for work, and a place to start afresh. Citizens of cities became known as “burghers,” a term that spread throughout medieval Western Europe and provided the basis for the later word “bourgeoisie.” It was only a matter of time before the burghers would grow wealthier and potentially even more powerful than the aristocracy.


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When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Wilson, William J., [date] When work disappears : the world of the new urban poor / William Julius Wilson.—first ed. p. cm. 1. Urban poor—United States. 2. Afro-Americans—Employment. 3. Inner cities—United States. 1. Title HV4045.W553 1996 362.′0973′091732—dc20 96–11803 eISBN: 978-0-307-79469-7 Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/ v3.1 To Beverly CONTENTS Cover About the Author Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION PART I THE NEW URBAN POVERTY CHAPTER 1 From Institutional to Jobless Ghettos CHAPTER 2 Societal Changes and Vulnerable Neighborhoods CHAPTER 3 Ghetto-Related Behavior and the Structure of Opportunity CHAPTER 4 The Fading Inner-City Family CHAPTER 5 The Meaning and Significance of Race: Employers and Inner-City Workers PART 2 THE SOCIAL POLICY CHALLENGE CHAPTER 6 The American Belief System Concerning Poverty and Welfare CHAPTER 7 Racial Antagonisms and Race-Based Social Policy CHAPTER 8 A Broader Vision: Social Policy Options in Cross-National Perspective APPENDIXES A.

The respondents from the households in the high-poverty neighborhoods included 383 mothers and 614 youths. Those from the households in the working- and middle-class neighborhoods were represented by 163 mothers and 273 youths. I have integrated the data from these three studies with census-type information and relevant findings from the research of other scholars. PART I THE NEW URBAN POVERTY CHAPTER 1 From Institutional to Jobless Ghettos An elderly woman who has lived in one inner-city neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago for more than forty years reflected: I’ve been here since March 21, 1953. When I moved in, the neighborhood was intact. It was intact with homes, beautiful homes, mini mansions, with stores, laundromats, with cleaners, with Chinese [cleaners].

The most fundamental difference between today’s inner-city neighborhoods and those studied by Drake and Cayton is the much higher levels of joblessness. Indeed, there is a new poverty in our nation’s metropolises that has consequences for a range of issues relating to the quality of life in urban areas, including race relations. By “the new urban poverty,” I mean poor, segregated neighborhoods in which a substantial majority of individual adults are either unemployed or have dropped out of the labor force altogether. For example, in 1990 only one in three adults ages 16 and over in the twelve Chicago community areas with ghetto poverty rates held a job in a typical week of the year.


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Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

Everyone in the forty-nine houseboats on the dock passed each other on foot daily, trundling to and from the parking lot on shore. Everyone knew each other’s faces and voices and cats. It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable. Building on that insight, Calthorpe became one of the founders of New Urbanism, along with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and others. In 1985 he introduced the concept of walkability in “Cities Redefined,” an article in the Whole Earth Review. Since then, New Urbanism has become the dominant force in city planning, promoting high density, mixed use, walkability, mass transit, eclectic design, and regionalism. It drew one of its major ideas from a squatter community.

For the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn’t just about money. It’s also about freedom. By 2004 I knew something important was up with the rampant urbanization of the developing world, but I couldn’t find much in the way of ground truth about it until the publication of Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World, by journalist Robert Neuwirth. His research strategy was to learn the relevant language and then live for months as a slum resident—in Rocinha (one of seven hundred favelas in Rio de Janeiro), in Kibera (a squatter city of 1 million outside Nairobi), in the Sanjay Gandhi Nagar neighborhood of Mumbai, and in Sultanbeyli, a now fully developed squatter city of 300,000 with a seven-story city hall, outside Istanbul.

Chances are you’ve come across Sausalito waterfront creativity in the writings of Annie Lamott, Alan Watts, Paul Hawken, or Green architect Sim Van Der Ryn; in the cartoons of Shel Silverstein or Phil Frank; in Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay”; in the Antenna Theater- produced Audio Tours that guide you around the world’s museums and historic sites; in the biological paintings of Isabella Kirkland; and in any town or city reshaped by what is called New Urbanism. That last item is my example. • In 1983, architect Peter Calthorpe gave up on San Francisco, where he had tried and failed to organize neighborhood communities, and moved to a houseboat on the end of South Forty Dock, where I live. He found he was in a place that had the densest housing in California, where no one locked their doors—where most of the doors didn’t even have locks.


Smart Cities, Digital Nations by Caspar Herzberg

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

The “urbanization” of our planet is well documented, as people are increasingly drawn from rural areas to cities seeking better opportunities and quality of life. By 2050, about two-thirds of the world’s population will live in or near urban centers.1 If we don’t get our cities right, we’re in big trouble. But there’s good news. Urban centers are incredible test beds for the Internet of Everything, the increasing connections between all of us, and digitization. Some of our most promising innovation is being fueled by cities working to create a better future for their citizens. We’re early in the journey, but there is a lot of progress being made.

It does not deliver services efficiently, nor does it utilize modern technology in ways that can both reduce operating costs and improve living standards. And yet, unchecked consumption is still a key principle for growth: more people, requiring more space, more goods, more services. The deck is stacked against cities that cannot adapt to the new global reality. Thanks to technological innovation, however, a new urban dynamism is in progress. Modern master plans for cities that recycle more, monitor usage better, and provide cleaner, more efficient living standards are on the drawing board—and some have been implemented. Brand-new cities, attuned to current needs, are taking shape, utilizing digital technology that revolutionizes how cities operate and provide for their citizens.

Business modeling must incorporate methods to adjust forecasts that may well prove too optimistic. This means the smart and connected city concept, however much it may signify the future, must be championed and defended. The architects must weigh a diverse and extensive set of variables when creating a new blueprint. Investors, residents, and administrators of these new urban landscapes will need to be convinced of the technology’s necessity through many business quarters to come. THE SMART AND CONNECTED CITY JOURNEY The first chapters of this book are chronological. They re-create the great promise and excitement generated when Saudi Arabia took its first bold steps toward building new economic cities out of the desert in 2006–2008.


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The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, carbon footprint, clean water, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lyft, megacity, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

The University of Chicago has built some student housing there, and we’ve built some mixed-income housing across the street. The population is up. Crime is down. Public and private investments have worked in concert and boosted each other. This is how you form the solid building blocks that create a neighborhood and a community. These three neighborhoods are examples of the “new urban policy,” as opposed to the standalone housing of yesterday. Let me take a moment to talk a little more about these neighborhoods. In our cities, they are as vital as the business centers, and should be treated as such. I knew that, during my tenure, I had to figure out a way to make the neighborhoods grow and prosper along with the great growth of our business centers.

Trust me, no developer wants to go in front of the Planning Commission with zero minority participation in their projects. Every mayor in one way or another has faced the criticism of a tale of two cities. I don’t buy that dichotomy. Cities today are a tale of two investments: For years one part received investment; one part was disinvested in. The neighborhood opportunity fund, the new urban policy, a food desert strategy, and modernized mass transit are all part of a one city one future agenda. No great city has a hollowed-out core. On the other hand, no great city has decaying neighborhoods. Turning one part of a city against another assures the whole city loses. What Washington Park, Woodlawn, and Bronzeville all have in common is that coordinated investments in housing, transportation, schools, libraries, and recreational facilities have spurred investments in new grocery stores, coffee shops, restaurants, and community art centers—a sustainable economic model that moves beyond urban policy as merely housing policy.

Our urban waterways, and all the industry and commerce and transportation they supported, were the original drivers in the creation of our world’s great cities. We have now returned to those waterways, reimagining and reinventing them. They have formed a bridge from the industrial age to our present age and once again given our cities life and vitality. Our new urban waterfronts are the cornerstones of the revival and resurgence of the city. They help make our cities better places to live, work, and play. Mikkelsen transformed Copenhagen with the overhaul of the city’s former industrial waterfront. Hidalgo has given the Seine back to Parisians. Oslo has a 5.5-mile Harbour Promenade, which links the city to its fjord and is responsible for two brand-new neighborhoods as well as scores of new restaurants and shops.


Stacy Mitchell by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers, the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

accelerated depreciation, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, drop ship, European colonialism, Haight Ashbury, income inequality, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, new economy, New Urbanism, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, RFID, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the long tail, union organizing, urban planning, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

(Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1999); Seth Harry, Seth Harry & Associates, interview, Mar. 29, 2005. 17. Harry interview; Congress for the New Urbanism, Council Report VI on Retail, published by The Town Paper and the Knight Program in Community Building, Feb. 2004; New Urban Post VIII: A Compilation of Online Discussions about the New Urbanism, published by the Knight Program in Community Building, Feb. 2004. 18. Harry interview; Council Report VI on Retail; New Urban Post VIII. 19. Harry interview; Richard Knitter, interview, Mar. 31, 2005; Robert Strauss, “Wal-Mart Zeros In on a South Jersey Township,” New York Times, Mar. 20, 2005. 20.

Expect major mall owners to step up their courting of discounters and big boxes. They need fallbacks if anchors go under. That could set oƒ a turbulent round of retailer musical chairs.”37 Colossal in both their physical and psychological impact, dead malls have attracted the most attention. A 2001 study by the Congress for the New Urbanism and PricewaterhouseCoopers conservatively estimated that 140 malls are either dead or nearly so, and an additional 250 are vulnerable to collapse. This represents one in five malls. The researchers found that another 570 malls have annual sales of between $200 and $250 per square foot, enough to remain viable, at least for now, but far below the revenue of bigbox retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, which generate about $400 per square foot.

The CLIC trade show—the acronym stands for Connecting and Linking Independents with Commercial Developments—also featured workshops for merchants on such topics as business planning, lease negotiations, and marketing.41 Neil Takemoto is working to catalyze similar confluences of investors, developers, city o‰cials, and local entrepreneurs in other cities. The director of CoolTown Studios and cofounder of the National Town Builders Association, a trade group of new urbanism developers, Takemoto points with frustration to the many heavily subsidized downtown redevelopment projects, such as Louisville’s Fourth Street Live and Kansas City’s Power & Light District, that are filled with chains. He believes the returns, both to cities and developers, would be greater if these projects featured unique, local businesses, because they would increase the value of nearby housing and attract “creative economy” enterprises.


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Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

Report on international conference on CCTV, Sheffield University, where Professor Clive Norris presented research findings. 12. Koster, Olinka, ‘I Dropped a Morsel of My Daughter’s Sausage Roll and the Litter Police Fined Me £75’, Daily Mail, 25/4/08 13. Smith, Neil, ‘Which New Urbanism? New York City and the Revanchist 1990s’, in R. Beauregard & S. Body-Gendrot, eds, The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th-Century City, Sage, 1999 14. Lambert, Bruce. ‘Ex-Outreach Workers Say They Assaulted Homeless’ 15. Smith, ‘Which New Urbanism?’ 16. Mitchell, Don & Staeheli, Lynn A., ‘Clean and Safe? Property Redevelopment, Public Space, and Homelessness in Downtown San Diego’, in Neil Smith & Setha Low, eds, The Politics of Public Space, Routledge, 17.

Knopf, 1977, republished Penguin Books, 2002 Shearing, Clifford & Johnston, Les, Governing Security: Explorations in Policing and Justice, Routledge, 2003 Sinclair, Iain, London Orbital, Granta, 2002 Smith, Neil & Low, Setha, eds, The Politics of Public Space, Routledge, 2005 Smith, Neil, ‘Which New Urbanism? New York City and the Revanchist 1990s’, in R. Beauregard & S. Body-Gendrot, eds, The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th Century City, Sage, 1999 Smith, Neil, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, Routledge, 1996 Sorkin, Michael, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, Hill & Wang, 1992 Steel, Carolyn, Hungry City, Chatto & Windus, 2008 Titmuss, Richard, Problems of Social Policy, HMSO, 1950 Wain, Neil, with Burney, Elizabeth, The ASBO: Wrong Turning, Dead End, Howard League for Penal Reform, 2007 Wilkinson, Richard, The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier, Routledge, 2005 Zukin, Sharon, The Cultures of Cities, Blackwell Publishing, 1995 REPORTS Ball, Kirstie & Wood, David Murakami, eds, ‘A Report on the Surveillance Society: For the Information Commissioner’, Surveillance Studies Network, 2006 Crawford, Adam & Lister, Stuart, The Use and Impact of Dispersal Orders: Sticking Plasters and Wake-Up Calls, University of Leeds, published for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Policy Press, 2007 Department for Communities and Local Government, Housing Market Renewal, National Audit Office, 2007 Department for Transport, Manual for Streets, 2007 Design Guide for Residential Areas, Essex County Council, 1973 Duffy, Bobby, Wake, Rhonda, Burrows, Tamara & Bremner, Pamela, Closing the Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions, Ipsos MORI, 2007 Eades, Chris, Grimshaw, Roger, Silvestri, Arianna & Solomon, Enver, ‘Knife Crime’: A Review of Evidence and Policy, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, second edition, 2008 Hills, John, Ends and Means: The Future Roles of Social Housing in England, Economic and Social Research Council, Research Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, CASE report 34, 2007 Holland, Caroline, Clark, Andrew, Katz, Jeanne & Peace, Sheila, Social Interactions in Urban Public Places, Open University, published for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Policy Press, 2007 Hough, Mike, Millie, Andrew, Jacobson, Jessica & McDonald, Eraina, Anti-Social Behaviour Strategies: Finding a Balance, Policy Press, 2005 Labour Party, A Quiet Life: Tough Action on Criminal Neighbours, 1995 LDDC Monograph, ‘Attracting Investment, Creating Value’, Establishing a Property Market, 1998 Minton, Anna & Jones, Sarah, Generation Squalor: Shelter’s National Investigation into the Housing Crisis, Shelter, 2005 Minton, Anna, Building Balanced Communities: The US and UK Compared, Royal Insitution of Chartered Surveyors, 2002 Minton, Anna, Mind the Gap: Tackling Social Polarization through Balanced Communities, Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, 2004 Minton, Anna, Northern Soul, Demos & Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, 2003 Minton, Anna, What Kind of World are We Building?

., ‘The Broken Windows Myth’, New York Times, 11/9/01 39. ‘Allegations against Police Rise’, BBC News Online, 25/9/08 40. Harcourt & Ludwig, ‘Broken Windows’ 41. Collins & Cattermole, Anti-Social Behaviour 42. Duffy, et al., Closing the Gaps 43. Harcourt, Illusion of Order 44. Smith, Neil, ‘Which New Urbanism? New York City and the Revanchist 1990s’, in R. Beauregard & S. Body-Gendrot, eds, The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th Century City, Sage, 1999 45. Etzioni, A., ‘Common Values’, New Statesman and Society, 12/5/95. Cited in Sarah Hale, ‘Communitarian Influence? Amitai Etzioni and the Making of New Labour’, unpublished paper, 2005 46.


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One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

Miriam van Bree, a member of the Dutch Cyclists Union (Fietsersbond), underscores this point in an interview from 2005: “Everyone thinks the netherlands is a cycling paradise, but if we didn’t put bikes on the agenda they’d be forgotten. it’s natural to cycle, but it’s not natural to make policy.”53 The provo sought to reverse this trend in the midst of its progression by politicizing both the automobile and the entire ideological framework it felt they symbolized. Former situationist architect and amsterdam native Constant nieuwenhuys (known simply as Constant) greatly influenced the provo’s proto- situationist critique of urbanism; Henri lefebvre even referred to him as one of the primary instigators of the youth movement.54 in his essay “new Urbanism,” published in Provo (no. 9), Constant argues that the use of urban space as a conduit for automobiles destroys the possibilities for authentic, non-consumer spaces: Traffic’s wholesale invasion of social space has led, almost imperceptibly, to violation of the most fundamental human rights. The traffic code has degraded the individual who proceeds by the only natural means of locomotion to the rank of “pedestrian,” and has curtailed his freedom of movement to such an extent that it now amounts to less than that of a vehicle.

This is an implicit acknowledgement that high-speed traffic is king of the road.55 Constant’s position is significant not only because he challenged the automobile as a usurper of social/material space but also because he revived and recontextualized the situationist critique in the struggle for sustainable transportation. The potentially practical applications of Schimmelpenninck’s bicycle plan and Constant’s “new Urbanism” paradigm were nonetheless ruthlessly attacked by the situationists, who saw the provo as an ineffectual youth uprising lacking a revolutionary program: “There is a modern revolution, and one of its bases could be the provos—but only without their leaders and ideology. if they want to change the world, they must get rid of these who are content to paint it white.”56 Despite the situationists’ scathing criticism— which they conveniently reserved for everyone except themselves—the provo effectively politicized the bicycle as a symbol of resistance against car culture, situating the White Bicycle plan within a radical critique of capitalism, public space, and environmental pollution. at a pragmatic level, the provo simultaneously pioneered the first public-use bicycle program in amsterdam, a model since replicated in European cities like Copenhagen (Denmark), Milan (italy), Helsinki (Finland), and rennes (France). in the United States, activists and bike enthusiasts similarly embraced the provo philosophy by constructing yellow bikes, pink bikes, checkered bikes, and green bikes out of salvaged materials, leaving them on the streets for anyone to use.57 While these programs have been largely unsuccessful due to bike theft and vandalism, their appearance in cities like portland, Minneapolis–St. paul (Minnesota), Boulder (Colorado), Olympia (Washington), austin (Texas), and princeton (new Jersey) inspired a new generation of cyclists and simultaneously introduced americans to the very idea of public bike-sharing programs that have the potential to become a vibrant part of the urban transportation schema in the United States.58 Ecotactiques and Anti-automobile Shows The provo demonstrated how bicycles could be symbolically and pragmatically incorporated into public protests as well as a sustained critique of car culture. in doing so, it pointed to the bicycle as a utopian mode of transportation, one ideally suited for a more egalitarian and ecologically sustainable society.

roelof Wittink, “planning for Cycling Supports road Safety,” in Sustainable Transport: Planning for Walking and Cycling in Urban Environments, ed. rodney Tolley (Cambridge, UK: Woodhead, 2003), 175. Dara Colwell, “riding to the rescue,” Village Voice, august 29, 2005. Kristin ross and Henri lefebvre, “lefebvre on the Situationists: an interview,” October 79 (1997): 71. Constant nieuwenhuys, “nieuw Urbanisme,” translated as “new Urbanism,” in BAMN, 2–6 (originally published in Provokatie, no. 9 [1966]). Situationist international with students at the University of Strasbourg, “On the poverty of Student life,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, Ca: Bureau of public Secrets, 1981), 328 (originally published in paris in 1966).


The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History by Greg Woolf

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, capital controls, classic study, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, Dunbar number, Easter island, endogenous growth, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, global village, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, joint-stock company, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, social web, the strength of weak ties, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

These temples were not just eye-catching; they were also at the centre of the economy.7 One alabaster vase, a metre in height, is decorated with a series of reliefs that seem to show animals and grain and perhaps beer being brought in tribute to the god. Rare traces of statuary survive too, showing that the Sumerians had begun to create monumental art. We know a little of what this new urban world looked like from the images carved into cylinder seals (see Figure 5). Carved in hard stones like carnelian, they are beautiful objects and survive in their hundreds. The seals were cylindrical so that they could be rolled across a clay surface to authenticate or authorize a document. The number of seals show the importance that writing—another new invention of the Uruk period—had in organizing society.

First, many early urban traditions collapsed after just a few hundred years: How could this happen if urbanism was so obviously an advance? Second, many of the neighbours of the world’s first urban civilizations resisted their allure very successfully: urbanism was obviously not that contagious. Third, even when new urban cultures did emerge on the fringe of older ones (like Nubia beside Egypt, or the Maya close by Mexico), they often seem very unfaithful copies. I suggest that it does not make much sense to draw a sharp distinction between primary and secondary urban civilizations. We have been inventing urbanism over and over again for thousands of years, and almost every invention is in some sense a new original, and most are also unfaithful copies.

., Angkor in Cambodia between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. The expansion of Europe over the last five centuries spread some urban models—all those plazas and cathedrals in the Americas, all those Victorian town halls in India, South Africa, and Australia—but local forms were never extinguished. New urban experiments and new variations on urban themes continue today. What does this complicated history of urbanism tell us about ourselves? That as a species we have an aptitude or even an inclination to build big urban nests? That in the special conditions of the current interglacial, the Holocene, when almost all of us live in societies sustained by farming, that aptitude has been expressed many times?


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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

Enabled by successions of mayors and governors and fueled by billions of federal dollars in Works Progress Administration and Interstate Highway funds, Moses amassed as many as twelve directorships and leadership positions over vital public works agencies, from the New York City Parkway Authority to the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to the state parks. The federal government created massive public works programs to build new urban roads and housing to replace the “slum” infrastructure of the nineteenth century. Moses was first in line to provide these “urban renewal” projects. The almost incomprehensible list of projects that he moved from planning to implementation from 1918 to his departure from government in 1968 included seventeen parkways and fourteen expressways that ringed and connected the city, and aesthetic and engineering marvels like the Verrazano-Narrows, Bronx-Whitestone, and Triborough bridges.

Jacobs understood that the neighborhoods and the streets of a city contain the seeds for renewal, and it is local residents who will ultimately lead the way. But after decades of lifelessness and danger, it’s obvious that cities will not succeed in transforming themselves through market forces, consensus, or by waiting for infrastructure to crumble before taking action. Retrofitting our cities for the new urban age and achieving Jane Jacobs’s vision today will require Moses-like vision and action for building the next generation of city roads, ones that will accommodate pedestrians, bikes, and buses safely and not just single-occupancy vehicles with their diminishing returns for our streets. Cities must adopt a more inclusive and humane approach to reshaping the urban realm and rebuilding it quickly to human scale, driven by a robust community process, but committed to delivering projects and not paralyzing them.

New York City’s forty miles of protected paths installed by 2014 led to dramatic decreases in traffic injuries by all street users, not just bike riders. In the absence of guidance, some cities have found new inspiration in Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach, produced in 2010 by the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Institute of Transportation Engineers. The guide was a huge step forward simply by including real-world examples of street design principles that cities have implemented and by representing people in the guide’s designs and their perspective of the street. And as more cities have experimented with innovative and bold street treatments, the heads of their transportation agencies have for the first time created their own playbook, incorporating designs that are now being perfected in cities across the continent.


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

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

Townsend, A. (2008) ‘Foreword’, in M. Foth (ed.), Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, pp. xxiii–xxvii. Townsend, A. (2015a) ‘Cities of data: Examining the new urban science’, Public Culture 27(2): 201–212. Townsend, A. (2015b) Making Sense of the New Urban Science. Rudin Center and Data & Society Research Institute, New York, available from: www.citiesofdata.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/04/Making-Sense-of-the-New-Science-of-Cities-FINAL-2015.7.7.pdf [accessed 24 November 2016]. Waal, M. de (2014) The City as Interface.

Kogler 46 Leadership and Place Edited by Chris Collinge, John Gibney and Chris Mabey 45 Migration in the 21st Century Rights, outcomes, and policy Kim Korinek and Thomas Maloney 44 The Futures of the City Region Edited by Michael Neuman and Angela Hull 43 The Impacts of Automotive Plant Closures A tale of two cities Edited by Andrew Beer and Holli Evans 42 Manufacturing in the New Urban Economy Willem van Winden, Leo van den Berg, Luis de Carvalho and Erwin van Tuijl 41 Globalizing Regional Development in East Asia Production networks, clusters, and entrepreneurship Edited by Henry Wai-chung Yeung 40 China and Europe The implications of the rise of China as a global economic power for Europe Edited by Klaus Kunzmann, Willy A Schmid and Martina Koll-Schretzenmayr 39 Business Networks in Clusters and Industrial Districts The governance of the global value chain Edited by Fiorenza Belussi and Alessia Sammarra 38 Whither Regional Studies?

Kitchin Urban big data, city operating systems, urban informatics and urban science analytics provide the basis for a new logic of urban control and governance – data-driven urbanism – that enables real-time monitoring and steering of urban systems and the creation of what has widely been termed smart cities. The notion of a smart city can be traced back to experiments with urban cybernetics in the 1970s (Flood 2011; Townsend 2013), the development of new forms of city managerialism and urban entrepreneurship, including smart growth and new urbanism, in the 1980s and 1990s (Hollands 2008; Wolfram 2012; Söderström et al. 2014; Vanolo 2014), and the fusing of ICT and urban infrastructure and development of initial forms of networked urbanism from the late 1980s onwards (Graham and Marvin 2001; Kitchin and Dodge 2011). As presently understood, a smart city is one that strategically uses networked infrastructure and associated big data and data analytics to produce a: •• •• •• •• •• •• smart economy by fostering entrepreneurship, innovation, productivity, competitiveness, and producing new forms of economic development such as the app economy, sharing economy and open data economy; smart government by enabling new forms of e-government, new modes of operational governance, improved models and simulations to guide future development, evidence-informed decision-making, better service delivery, and making government more transparent, participatory and accountable; smart mobility by creating intelligent transport systems, efficient interoperable multi-modal public transport, smart parking and sharing services related to taxis and bikes; smart environments by promoting sustainability and resilience and the development of green energy; smart living by improving quality of life, increasing safety and security and reducing risk; smart people by creating a more informed citizenry and fostering creativity, inclusivity, empowerment and participation (Giffinger et al. 2007; Cohen 2012).


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

“Gentrification Generalized: From Local Anomaly to Urban ‘Regeneration’ as Global Urban Strategy.” In Melissa S. Fisher et al., Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. ———. “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy.” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002). ———. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Soffer, Jonathan. Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Solnit, Rebecca. Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism.

When the New York Times Magazine published their 1979 story “The New Elite and an Urban Renaissance,” they celebrated gentrification’s arrival in Manhattan with splashy photographs of boutiques and bistros, tins of paté at Zabar’s, and expensive sports cars on (gasp!) the gritty Upper West Side’s Columbus Avenue. Who were the new urban settlers enjoying all these luxuries? With an average age of thirty-five and annual incomes over $20,000, “[t]he young gentry,” said the Times, had fled the suburbs to “gladly endure the urban indignities their parents ran away from. This new breed of professionals is willing to put up with smaller apartments, dirty streets, and crime in order to live in chic neighborhoods.”

Alan Ehrenhalt calls this demographic shift the “great inversion,” as the affluent flood into urban centers and the poor are pushed to the suburbs. As a result, he writes, “we need to adjust our perceptions of cities, suburbs, and urban mobility.” I’m not ready to make that adjustment. I’m not ready to give up on the city. Even Andrés Duany, the father of New Urbanism, sees a problem here. He complained to The Atlantic in 2010 that suburban young people are “destroying the city,” coming in like locusts with a “destructive monoculture.” These people “love cities desperately,” he said. “And they’re loving them to death.” I’ll ask again: What, exactly, is being loved?


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

As has happened many times throughout American history, many of the greatest innovations have come at times of great challenge, and this moment, on the heels of a string of economic troubles, is no exception. The financial crisis and the Great Recession proved that we could no longer apply old solutions to new urban problems, nor could cities exclusively rely on the action of the federal government. Rather, local governments and civil society as well as business leaders and urban planners have come together to chart their own course to spark job creation and catalyze long-term economic growth. 00-2151-2 fm.indd 8 5/21/13 10:10 AM FOREWORD ix In The Metropolitan Revolution, Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley describe, in good detail, many examples of how this economic, social, and political transformation is playing out across the United States.

By 2025, McKinsey & Company estimates, 1 billion more people will have entered the global “consuming class,” meaning that they will have enough income to be consumers of global goods. The bulk of these consumers will live in cities outside of the United States and Europe. McKinsey estimates that of these 1 billion new urban consumers, 600 million will live in 440 cities in emerging markets, markets that will be responsible for half of global GDP growth between 2010 and 2025.45 That growth will contribute to an already large market for goods that exists outside the United States; according to the U.S. International Trade Administration, 70 percent of the world’s purchasing power is located outside the United States.46 Places that innovate will be able to take advantage of rising global demand for new kinds of products and services.

They have the potential, with smart land use and catalytic policies, to be multidimensional in purpose, expanding transportation choices and mobility, to be sure, but also galvanizing new destinations along their routes, including new residential areas, retail clusters, and economic districts. Across the United States, fledgling innovation districts are beginning to take hold in this new urban geography of innovation. In Houston, a new light-rail system connects the strong central business district (with its phalanx of energy company headquarters) with the Museum District, the Houston Medical Campus, and the University of Houston. In Cleveland, the new Euclid Corridor Bus Rapid Transit system connects the traditional downtown with University Circle (with Case Western, Cleveland Clinic, and key cultural institutions).


pages: 304 words: 85,291

Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith

Anthropocene, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, diversified portfolio, failed state, financial innovation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, New Urbanism, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, SimCity, South China Sea, telemarketer, the built environment, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

How many times have you been in a new city, and on the first day someone asks you for directions? Within a short time, you have already become more expert than someone else in a way that you could never be in a small town or a dispersed village where people can be hard to find and perhaps a bit reluctant to give information to a stranger. In being able to carry on in your new urban surroundings, you’re just the same as the leader of a long-ago merchant caravan entering Byzantine Constantinople or the shepherd bringing a flock into market in ancient Babylon. Like them, when you enter the city, you first seek out something familiar: the marketplace, a crossroads, an eatery. While you are there, you are able to look around you, to get a sense of your surroundings, to see what others are doing and how they are dressed, to ascertain where they are coming from and where you are going next.

And once they made their sense of place permanent, the people who lived at Brak in some respects locked themselves into new social and economic patterns, becoming much busier than they had ever been in the countryside. Their activities included not only new forms of entrepreneurship and new strategies of living close to strangers in neighborhoods but also staggering new projects of religious architecture right in the city. Among the most startling of the new urban religious edifices was the Eye Temple, which Mallowan started excavating in 1937. It’s named the Eye Temple because of all the . . . eyes. Digging deep in the temple’s long-buried rubble, Mallowan uncovered thousands of little carved figurines staring up at him from the dirt, with oversized, eerie eyes on an otherwise abstract geometric body.

The idea of having to take responsibility for the built environment, rather than just carrying on in the same idiosyncratic way as villagers, or trusting that a place of habitation would just clean itself once the crowds were gone, was probably an unexpected surprise for those initial urban dwellers. After all, they were already busy doing more work in cities than they ever had in the countryside as they engaged in new entrepreneurial activities of manufacturing, navigated new urban spaces of intensive architecture, and made contacts in dispersed spaces of work, residence, and leisure. From Rome and Xi’an to Tikal and Cuzco, ancient people actively shaped their growing urban environments through the building of structures and the creation of public spaces like plazas and ports.


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Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

It is based on widespread democratic participation and the reinvigoration of a culture of local politics that includes rather than excludes local people and communities.fn1 In the US, Right to the City is also the name of an influential campaign movement which emerged in 2007 as a response to gentrification, aiming to halt the displacement from communities of people on lower incomes. Now a global movement, the concept was included for the first time in the UN’s New Urban Agenda, agreed in Quito, Ecuador, in 2016, which enshrined the ‘right to the city’ vision in the legislation, political declarations and charters of national and local governments. As such it represented a very significant victory for civil society groups battling against gentrification, repossessions, the privatization of public space and the criminalization of homelessness.fn2 Today, the right to the city is an intellectual idea, campaign slogan, political ideal and legislative mechanism which can help to answer the question posed by this book: who is the city for?

While this is welcome, given the scale of the crisis it feels more like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic than providing real alternatives, a reality perhaps reflected by the comments from the mayor’s housing adviser, James Murray, that ‘this is a marathon, not a sprint’.5 Only a paradigm shift in British housing policy will be able to address the housing crisis and the failure to provide homes Londoners can afford, which is such an important part of Right to the City’s agenda. The planning system is not equipped to deal with the severity of the situation, with Section 106 failing to build anything like the number of affordable homes needed since it was introduced more than twenty-five years ago. The inclusion of the right to the city as part of the UN’s New Urban Agenda is important to the UK as the housing crisis is now so serious that new legislative solutions and levers are needed. We must re-examine the operation of property and land markets and their interaction with taxation and the planning system and the marketization of the benefits system. Devolution of powers at local authority and city and regional level should also have a far greater role to play than they do at present.

Perraudin, Frances, ‘Government criticised for holding housing bill debate lasting until 2 am’, Guardian, 6 January 2016 36. Topple, Steve, ‘The Housing and Planning Bill reveals how little Tory MPs think of the public’, Independent, 13 January 2016 3. DEMOLITIONS 1. Lees, Loretta, ‘The urban injustices of New Labour’s “new urban renewal”: the case of the Aylesbury Estate in London’, Antipode, 2013 2. ‘Faulty Towers: Understanding the Impact of Overseas Corruption on the London Property Market’, Transparency International UK, March 2017 3. ‘Knock It Down or Do It Up? The Challenge of Estate Regeneration’, London Assembly Housing Committee, February 2015.


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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

Recognizing that mixed-use development was key in attracting people to move into higher-density areas, the developer invested strategically in ground-floor spaces for non-residential uses. Buildings with active frontages were deliberately placed along a busy route with heavy motorized traffic. The developer coached new businesses in the development, cultivating professionalism and helping with interior decoration and marketing. The new urban blocks of Nya Hovås display classic layering, with business premises on the ground floor, facing the busy main street, and apartments on the floors above. Special apartments on the top floor make for a distinctive and varied roofscape, which adds character to the new neighborhood and makes a local landmark for passing traffic.

Although some of the inspiration may have come from Barcelona, throughout the inner suburbs of Melbourne a new architecture is appearing, an urban vernacular, totally unique and belonging to its place. This kind of development model is relevant for many other parts of the world, demonstrating that high density is possible without high rise, and that increased density can offer better quality of life for more people. Melbourne’s new urban vernacular architecture The “Linear Barcelona” Model Existing situation with low-density streets served by quality public transport. In the short to medium terms, streets can be upgraded with trees, bike lanes, and furniture, and the first new buildings can be constructed alongside the old.

These two spaces complement each other, and their inherent differences create options for residents who can choose where they want to spend time and when. 02.-04. A significant behavior is residents leaving their doors open and their personal effects spilling out onto the street, demonstrating a culture of spending more time outdoors, as well as a level of trust we would associate with an old, rural village and not a relatively new, urban development. A Green Neighborhood At Bo01, the plan included a so-called green-space factor, which address the benefits of elements supporting biodiversity. In the same way as every plot had a different building architect, each also had a different landscape architect, ensuring a variety of solutions.


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Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Spurred on, first by colonialism and then by structural adjustment policies, the peasantry in many developing countries has been forced off their lands via global competition, rapid industrialisation and rampaging climate change. Like the earlier European experience of industrialisation, dispossessed rural workers have migrated to urban areas to find jobs. And in Europe, too, this process sometimes led to slum-dwelling and destitution for the new urban proletariat.98 But this is where the similarities end, as in Europe the transition involved creating sufficient numbers of jobs, the emergence of a strong industrial working class, and the eventual provision of housing for migrants.99 Under conditions of postcolonial development, this narrative has been broken.

And in Europe, too, this process sometimes led to slum-dwelling and destitution for the new urban proletariat.98 But this is where the similarities end, as in Europe the transition involved creating sufficient numbers of jobs, the emergence of a strong industrial working class, and the eventual provision of housing for migrants.99 Under conditions of postcolonial development, this narrative has been broken. Rather than a scarcity of labour, recent industrialisation has occurred in the context of a large and global labour force.100 The result has been little development of anything resembling a traditional working class, continually weak job prospects and a lack of adequate housing.101 New urban migrants have been left in a permanent state of transition between peasantry and proletarianisation, and sometimes in seasonal circulation between rural existence and urban poverty.102 Slums and other improvised housing therefore represent a dual expulsion from the land and from the formal economy.103 This surplus humanity, having been deprived of its traditional means of subsistence yet left without employment, has been forced to create its own non-capitalist subsistence economies.

ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook: The Changing Nature of Jobs (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), p. 18. 33.For example, black males in the United States were particularly affected by the automation and outsourcing of manufacturing. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), pp. 29–31. 34.Michael McIntyre, ‘Race, Surplus Population, and the Marxist Theory of Imperialism’, Antipode 43:5 (2011), p. 1500–2. 35.These draw broadly upon the divisions Marx drew between the floating/reserve army, latent and stagnant, but are here offered as an updating of his historical example. 36.Gary Fields, Working Hard, Working Poor: A Global Journey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 46. 37.This is what Kalyan Sanyal describes as ‘need economies’.


World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

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

In many parts of the world, governance at the city level is showing it can innovate much more quickly than national governments, and these innovations are being shared and adapted by agile networks of global cities. But the message of this book is that global cities and nation states share a mutual interest in inventing solutions to the problems of our new urban century, and giving cities the tools to implement them at scale. Nation states therefore still have a pivotal role to play. There are a number of areas – national defense, international trade and the social safety net – where national governments must continue to set the rules and provide a stable environment.

The success of central government’s interventions in India’s urban areas will have global repercussions. India’s urban population growth will account for a fifth of the global total up to 2030. How its cities handle this growth will affect international human development indicators and shape perceptions of urbanisa­ tion’s benefits and potential. It is therefore crucial that India’s new urban agenda is coherently articulated by a wider national policy that features mechanisms for implementation by the states (Nair, 2015; Bonislawski, 2016). Ongoing challenges where Mumbai needs help from national government Mumbai’s most urgent or difficult challenges are not immediately solvable at the national level alone.

If this approach is pursued, the State will need to act judiciously to avoid mistakes that famously Moscow 169 took place in the 1995 loan‐for‐shares scandal (Buckley, 2016; Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation, 2016a, 2016b). The national system of cities: Moscow and Russia Russia reached a high threshold of urbanisation at the end of the Soviet era, at 73%, and this figure has stayed roughly the same for the following 25 years. Although new urban settlements have been established, a low birth rate has also prevented the share of urban residents from rising much further. The most visible development in the system of cities in the post‐Communist era is the way Moscow has come to play an even more dominant role in the Russian system, at a cost of considerable financial distortions and disparities in less‐developed regions.


The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Cleveland (viciously dubbed “the Mistake by the Lake” by urban detractors) put its hopes on waterfront attractions like nightclubs and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Even bleak Camden, New Jersey, has lured tourists to its postindustrial waterfront by building a state-of-the-art aquarium and children’s park. Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—among others—provided lavish subsidies for new urban stadiums and sports arenas. Even if, in nearly every case, their costs outweighed their benefits, stadium builders and many fans celebrated the intimacy, postmodern style, and symbolism of their new coliseums.15 Skeptics of showy downtown redevelopment schemes have promoted community-based economic development as an alternative.

For a comparison of levels of segregation in Detroit and other major American cities in 1940, 1950, and 1960, see Karl E. Taeuber and Alma F. Taeuber, Negroes in Cities: Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Change (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1965), 39–41. On economic restructuring and job loss, see John D. Kasarda, “Urban Change and Minority Opportunities,” in The New Urban Reality, ed. Paul E. Peterson (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1985), 43–47, esp. Tables 1 and 2. According to Kasarda, the most marked difference between Detroit’s labor market and that of other major cities was the decline in employment in Detroit’s service sector, mainly after 1967 (45).

William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Kasarda, “Urban Change and Minority Opportunities,” and “Urban Industrial Transition and the Underclass,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 501 (1989): 26–47, and other articles by Kasarda. For authors who emphasize race, see Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Gary Orfield, “Ghettoization and Its Alternatives,” in Peterson, The New Urban Reality, 161–96, and “Separate Societies: Have the Kerner Warnings Come True?” in Quiet Riots: Race and Poverty in the United States, ed. Fred R. Harris and Roger Wilkins (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); Susan Fainstein and Norman Fainstein, “The Underclass/Mismatch Hypothesis as an Explanation for Black Economic Deprivation,” Politics and Society 15 (1986–87): 403–51. 6.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Their hyperfunctional connectivity over a plane vertically separated above or below the traditional street, she argues, works to ‘create an extreme form of stratification in a context better suited for mixture, the integration of people from all different races and classes.’21 Poor urban minorities, Terranova writes, have often been relegated to residualised and exteriorised street levels ‘where retail has tended to languish and reserving the walkway system for white-collar workers.’ Conversely, the world within the interior complexes is, at best, private/public space organised overwhelmingly around the imperatives of consumption. The move from outside to inside is a passage between worlds. ‘Step from the wind and cold on the street outside into the new urban realm’, invites architecture critic Trevor Boddy. ‘As the glass doors firmly close, the mental realm changes. We are inside, contained, separate, part of the system, a consumer, a pursuer, a cruiser.’22 There is certainly strong evidence that interior cities in North America often ‘accommod[ate] those activities (and people) that can be commercially exploited, expelling the rest.’23 In many cities, the raised up (or subterranean) system has become the dominant means for pedestrians to move around the downtown area.

The cycle here is as old as urbanisation itself, although the scale of the processes involved has multiplied massively in the last two centuries. Fire, disaster, war, replanning, obsolescence, ruination or simply the desire for improvement leads to the demolition or destruction of buildings or infrastructure, or simply to their absorption into a higher level of ground, aided by gravity. New urban soils are gradually created from ‘trash, construction debris, coal ash, dredged sediments, petrochemical contamination, green lawns, decomposing bodies, and rock ballast.’6 Such accretions, in turn, are flattened to create a new, raised, surface level, which then becomes the building surface and the new ‘ground’ level.

By this date, a body of material weighing 200 times as much as the Empire State Building – that’s 9 kg for very person on Earth – will be dumped on the fringes of coastal cities, largely in China, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, to be dismantled and processed by hand, by armies of poor labourers, often in appalling conditions. Once the valuable metals and parts are removed the rest will sediment itself into new urban ground.19 The ‘Archaeosphere’ The science of geology has evolved to study the stratigraphic accumulation of rocks and materials through ‘natural’ processes. Archaeology, by contrast, developed to understand the evolution of human societies through their preserved material legacies in the ground.


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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

To harmonize competing interests in a successful human habitat, our response to these stresses needs to emerge from within, not be imposed from the outside. Notes 1 https://www.peakprosperity.com/ 2 James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2005). 3 Steve Mouzon, The Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability (New Urban Guild Foundation, 2010). 4 https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/8/25/stroad-nation.html. 5 Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City (New York: Vintage Books, 2012). 6 https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/the-changing-geography-of-us- poverty/. 7 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2007). 8 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (New York: Random House, 2012). 9 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/opinion/05friedman.html. 7 Productive Places A few blocks from my home there is a restaurant with several historic photos hanging on the wall.

Over time, particularly as my work with Strong Towns progressed and I found myself interacting with lots of people outside of my moral matrix, I eventually stopped clinging to culturally defined political labels and allowed my own beliefs to wander. In 2015, I was invited to speak on a panel titled “Bipartisan Placemaking: Reaching Conservatives” at the Congress for the New Urbanism in Dallas. I thought about my remarks and came up with this formulation that fits most closely with my view of the world: At the national level, I tend to be libertarian. Let’s do a few things and do them very competently. At the state level, I tend to be a Minnesota version of conservative Republican.

., 121–122 Chicken problem, 195 Cities, 37–62 abandonment of, 109–110 accounting for infrastructure by, 70–71 budgeting and growth in, 50–57 contracting of, 154 Detroit, Michigan, 60–62 development of Pompeii, Italy, 5–10 economic stability of modern, 104–106 engineer's view of, 11 experimental development pattern in, 126–127 filling gaps in, 160–163 and illusion of wealth, 57–60 incremental growth in founding of, 15–20 as infinite game, 38–41 and infrastructure, 44–50 maintenance required for infrastructure in, 115 modern development of, 12 revenues and expenses, 41–44 traditional vs. modern development of, 1–3 Cities and the Wealth of a Nation (Jacobs), 101–102 City Council of Santa Ana, ix, x City engineer, 177t City halls, 43–44 City planner, 177t Class: and neighborhoods, 21–22 and re-urbanization, 116 Clinton, Bill, 209 Clinton, Hillary, 63 Cognitive Architecture (Sussman and Hollander), 8 Cognitive discounting, 65 Collaboration, between government officials and citizens, 195–197 Commers, Jon, 45 Common infrastructure, 130 Community living, 199–218 differing opinions in, 206–212 and extended family, 200–201 as infinite game, 39–40 meaning in, 212–218 in neighborhoods, 202–203 in Pompeii, Italy, 6–7 walking in, 203–206 Complex, adaptive systems: human habitats as, 3–4 and incremental growth, 168 incremental growth of, 15–16, 18–19 rational decision making with, 120–123 Complex buildings, 20–23 Complicated buildings, 20–23 Complicated systems, 11–14 Confirmation bias, 69, 74, 183–186 Conflicts, dealing with, 206–212 Congress for the New Urbanism, 210 Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 78–80 Constraints: and economic stability, 93–96 and gold standard, 90 growth as, 100 prudent, for investments, 164–168 removal of, in modern world, 59–60, 96 Construction costs, 136–137 Consumption, 215–216 Costa Rica, 126–127 The Crash Course (Martenson), 108 Critical systems, 182–183 Cross-generational civic collaboration, 187 D Dallas, Texas, 159 Darwin, Charles, 8 The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs), 8 Debt: and cash flow, 98 for federal government, 186 for government, 96–100 for local government, 113–114 for place-oriented government, 186–192 for projects with quality-of-life benefits, 187 for state government, 113–114 Debt to income ratio, 97 Decision making: rational, see Rational decision making subsidiarity in, 195–198 Default, on municipal debt, 191 Deneen, Patrick, 211 Density, as urban planning metric, 128–129 Depression economics, 86–89 Detroit, Michigan, 60–62 land values in, 24 renewal of urban, 117–119 Development projects: cash flow over life cycle of, 52–57, 53f, 55f, 56f decisions about failing, 115–120 Diamond, Jared, 58, 59, 84 Dig Deep, 211 Donjek, 45 Downtown, productivity of, 134–140, 139t, 143–144 Duany, Andres, 195 Duggan, Mike, 119 Duncanville, Texas, 160 E Economic development department, 178t Economics: and benefits of infrastructure spending, 72–73 in depressions, 86–89 Economic stability, 83–106 and auto-oriented development, 29–30 and constraints, 93–96 creating, 85–86 and depression economics, 86–89 and focus on growth, 100–102 following World War II, 89–91 and government debt, 96–100 growth vs. wealth, 102–104 of modern cities, 104–106 and post-war boom, 91–93 risk management strategies for, 83–85 Edges, 7–8 Edges of city: center vs., 28 city infrastructure necessary for, 115 productivity of, 134–138, 143–144 Efficiency, designing for, 174–176 Ehrenhalt, Alan, 116 Empire State Building (New York, New York), 129 Employment, in productive places, 133 England, 83 Expenses, and revenues, 41–44 Extended family, 200–201 F Failure, slow, 110–115 Failure to Act (ASCE report), 65–67 Family, extended, 200–201 Fannie Mae, 92 Farmers, risk management strategies of, 83–84 Federal Funds Rate, 97 Federal government: debt for, 186 impact of infrastructure on, 79 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 89, 92 Federal Reserve, 99 Feedback, in local governments, 173–174 Ferguson, Missouri, 93, 114 FHA (Federal Housing Administration), 89 Financial status, local government's understanding of, 190–191 Finished states, neighborhoods built to, 21–23 “First ring” suburbs, 94 Form-based codes, 193–194 Fragile systems, 4 Franchises, productivity of, 133–134 Freddie Mac, 92 Future, predicting needs for, 19–20, 120–121 G Gaps, in cities, 160–163 Garcia, Anthony, 158 Gas tax, 75 Gawron, Stephen, 161 Gehl, Jan, 8 “General Theory of Walkability,” 206 Gentrification, of urban neighborhoods, 117 Goals, of individuals vs. communities, 40–41 Goland, Carol, 84 Gold reserves, 94 Gold standard, as basis for trade, 90 Government debt, 96–100 Government policies, prioritizing traffic, 29 Great Depression, 87–89, 191 The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City (Ehrenhalt), 116 Great Society, 93 Growth: economic stability and focus on, 100–102 in municipalities, 50–57 as objective of local governments, 176 wealth vs., 102–104 H Haidt, Jonathan, 208, 209, 215 Hardship, response to, 172–174 Hasidic Judaism, 213–214, 217 Hemingway, Ernest, 4 Henwood, Doug, 79 Hierarchies, in local government, 174–176 Highland neighborhood (Shreveport, Louisiana), 220 Highland Park (Shreveport, Louisiana), 220 High land values, 27–30 High Point, North Carolina, 161 Highway bypass corridor, 134–138 Hollander, Justin B., 8, 9 Homeless shelters, xi Homes, changing, 20 Hoover, Herbert, 87 Horizontal expansion, in California, 197 Housing: in California, 197–198 post-war changes in, 92 preference for single-family, 144–145 Housing authority, 178t How to Live in a World We Don't Understand (Taleb), 59 Human habitats, 1–14 as complex, adaptive systems, 3–4 in North America, 1–3 spooky wisdom in, 5–10 as systems that are complicated, 11–14 Hunter-gatherer existence, 58 Hurricane Katrina, 102–103 Hurricane Rita, 102–103 I Illusion of Wealth: and constant maintenance, 152 human response to, 57–60 Illusion of Wealth phase of development, 143 Improvement to Land (I/L) Ratio, 25, 25f, 117 Improvement value, 23–25, 25f Incentives, to fix problems, 113 Income taxes, 72 Incremental changes, implementing, 122–123, 156–157 Incremental growth, 15–35 and complex, adaptive systems, 168 complex vs. complicated buildings in, 20–23 constraints on, 164 and founding of cities, 15–20 good and bad development in, 34–35 and high land values, 27–30 and neighborhood renewal, 23–27 private and public investment in, 30–34 in traditional habitat development, 2 Infill projects, 160 Infrastructure, 63–81 accounting for, 70–71 and American Society of Civil Engineers, 65–67 calculating returns on investment for, 67–69 Congressional Budget Office on, 78–80 development of, 30–34 as investment, 41–42 in modern development, 32 and municipalities, 44–50 perception of need for more, 63–65 ratio of private to public investment in, 129–130 real return on investment, 74–78 secondary effects of, 72–74 Infrastructure Cult: development of, 65–67 paper returns calculated by, 69 Insolvency, 187–192 Interstate highway system, 92 Investment(s), 147–170 barbell investment approach, 148–150 capital, 171–172 conventional vs. strong towns thinking about, 185–186, 186t in filling gaps in cities, 160–163 impact of regulations on, 194 infrastructure as, 41–42 little bets, 150–160 low-risk investments with steady returns, 150–155 prudent constraints for, 164–168 public and private, 30–34, 31f, 32f returns on, see Return on investment in Suburban Retrofit, 168–169 Italy, walking in, 203–204 J Jacobs, Jane, 8, 101–102 Japan, 76 Jimmy's Pizza, 161–162 Job creation, 49, 72–73 Johnson, Neil, 12, 13 Junger, Sebastian, 216–217 K Keynes, John Maynard, 88 Keynesian economic policies, 88 Krugman, Paul, 63, 78 Kunstler, James, 110–111 L Lafayette, Louisiana, 101, 141–144, 151 Landau, Moshe, 213–214, 217 Land value: in declining suburbs, 113 and interstate highway project, 92 and neighborhood renewal, 23–25, 25f in neighborhoods with different types of properties, 165–167, 165f, 166f and suburban development, 27–30 Learning, from previous local investments, 187 Legacy programs, 173 Lifestyle choices, 202, 205–206 “Lifestyle enclaves,” 208 Little bets, 16–18, 150–160 Local economy: as basis for national economy, 101–102 national vs., 103 Local government: changes in, to maintain economic stability, 105–106 debt taken on by, 113–114 funded by state government, 95 impact of infrastructure on, 79–80 profit run by, 37–38, 147 relationship of state and, 198 Long declines, 110–115 “Long emergency,” 110–111 Long Recession of the 1870s, 77 Los Angeles, California, xi Lovable places, 10 Low-risk investments, with steady returns, 150–155 Lydon, Mike, 158 M Maintenance: ability to keep up with, 109 cash-flow debt to cover, 188–192, 188f–190f of development projects, 52–57 of infrastructure, 46–49 need for constant, 151–154 in place-oriented government, 180–183 required for single-family homes, 112 Maintenance department, 179t Manhattan, New York, 24 Martenson, Chris, 108 Meaning, life of, 212–218 Middle class, 92, 93, 144–145 Milan, Italy, 164 Mills Fleet Farm, 134–137 Minicozzi, Joseph, 138–140, 161 “Minnesota Miracle,” 95 Mixed-use neighborhoods, 163, 169 Modern city development: as high-risk investments, 149 as lead by pubic investment, 34–35 productive places in, 131–134 Modern Monetary Theory, 99 Mortgages, during Great Depression, 88–89 Mouzon, Steve, 10, 113 Muskegon, Michigan, 161 N National Association of Home Builders, 136 National economy, local vs., 103 Natural disasters, 102–103 Neighborhoods: abandonment of, 109–110 built to finished states, 21–23 changing in post-war era, 92–93 community living in, 202–203 decline of, 113 gentrification of urban, 117 mixed-use, 163, 169 renewal of, and incremental growth, 23–27 responses to improvements in, 158 structured around religions, 214 in transition sections of Detroit, 118 Neighbors, being involved with, 202–203 New Deal economics, 87–88 New Orleans, Louisiana, 102, 182 Nixon, Richard, 94 Noncritical systems, 182 O Oak Cliff neighborhood (Dallas, Texas), 159 Obama, Barack, 63 Obesity, among Pacific Islanders, 58–59 Options Real Estate, 160 Orange County, California, xi–xii Order, chaos vs., 121–122 The Original Green (Mouzon), 10, 113 Oroville dam (California), 182 Oswego, New York, 152 Oswego Renaissance Association, 152 P Pacific Islanders, 58–59, 183–185 Paper returns on investment, 67–69 Paradox of Avarice, 104 Paradox of Thrift, 88, 104 Pareidolia, 8–9, 9f Parks department, 178t Party analogy, 34–35 A Pattern Language (Alexander), 8 Pension funds, 56–57, 70, 98 Pequot Lakes, Minnesota, 44–46 Perception, of need for more infrastructure, 63–65 Personal preferences, 144–145 Peru, 84 Place-oriented government, 171–198 and confirmation bias, 183–186 designed for efficiency, 174–176 focus on broad wealth creation by, 176–180 maintenance as priority for, 180–183 and regulations, 192–194 response to hardship by, 172–174 subsidiarity in, 195–198 understanding of debt by, 186–192 Political differences, 207 Pompeii, Italy, 5–10 Post-war boom: and economic stability, 91–93 modern city development established in, 12 Power, subsidiarity principle and, 196–198 Prayer of Saint Francis, 218 Prioritization, of maintenance, 180–183 Private development, 40 Private investment: private to public investment ratio, 129–130 public and, 30–34, 31f, 32f Private sector (businesses): response to economic hardship in, 172–173 small, see Small businesses Problem solving, 13–14 Productive places, 125–146 downtown vs. edge of town, 134–138 in past, 125–127 and personal preferences, 144–145 productivity calculations for, 128–130 return on investment, 141–144 traditional vs. modern development in, 131–134 value per acre, 138–141 Productivity, calculations of, 128–130 Project teams, 179–180 Property taxes, 49 Property value, 23–25, 25f Public health, and walking neighborhoods, 205 Public investment: private and, 30–34, 31f, 32f private to public investment ratio, 129–130 returns required for, 147 Public safety department, 179t Q Quality-of-life benefits, 187 Quantitative Easing, 99 R Railroad companies, 77 Rational decision making, 107–123 about failing development systems, 115–120 about long declines, 110–115 within complex, adaptive system, 120–123 and lack of single solution, 107–110 Real return on investment, 74–78 Redevelopment, financial productivity after, 131–134, 139–140, 139t Redundant systems, 182 ReForm Shreveport, 219, 220 Regulations: from place-oriented government, 192–194 and subsidiarity principle, 195–198 Repealing regulations, 192–193 Republican Party, 209 Request for proposal (RFP), 50 Residents, learning concerns of, 156–157 Resources: assumption of abundance of, 12–14 wasted, in modern development, 19 Retreats, strategic, 108–109 Return on investment, 141–144 calculating, for infrastructure, 67–69 for capital projects, 171–172 in cities, 44 and debt taken on by local governments, 187 low-risk investments with steady, 150–155 paper, 67–69 real, 74–78 social, 78–79 Revenues, and expenses, 41–44 RFP (request for proposal), 50 The Righteous Mind (Haidt), 208 Risk management strategies, 83–85 Roaring Twenties, 87 Roberts, Jason, 159 Roosevelt, Franklin, 87, 88 Rotary International, 203 S St.


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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

As the public sphere became more inhospitable and enervating to get around in, the private sphere improved. Homes are better equipped, more comfortable, and more entertaining than ever before. This domestic retreat presents a challenge to Traditional Town Planning or the New Urbanism, which purports to restore community and public life by offering a proven alternative to the anti-community tract housing that spread like a plague after World War II. The New Urbanism incorporates principles of architecture and layout similar to those developed in the 1920s when we knew how to build communities and proceeded accordingly. But is the architectural remedy sufficient? In a recent feature in Preservation Magazine, Alan Ehrenhalt focuses on a public square well located and designed to attract the townspeople—but it doesn’t.2 His account reminded me of an automobile trip I took a few years ago, during which I made stops at the Clock Tower Square in Marion, Illinois, “The Hill” in St.

Never without a sense of who he is and where he is headed, Vic sums up his philosophy in the face of the pressures put upon his business by the trends in retailing and in the book business: “Our culture has been changed significantly by the automobile, allowing people to live far from their communities; and to a lesser extent by zoning laws and building codes that have emptied our downtowns of residents. Apartments above storefronts are now mostly empty because of elevators and other code requirements. Recently, we have seen a reversal of these trends in what has been labeled the New Urbanism movement. I applaud these changes. I’m more interested in preserving Traverse City as a viable living space where people interact with neighbors and friends than in worrying about what happens in the book business.” Vic Herman claims that the third place aspects of Horizon Books are somehow accidental.


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

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

A recent report by William Frey, Jill Wilson, Alan Berube, and Audrey Singer (2004) determines that it is difficult to compare census data based on the older definitions to census data based on the newer definitions. Therefore, to ensure a change-over-time analysis, it is necessary to pick between these older and newer definitions. I choose the older definitions. 4 For information on more recent census definitions, see U.S. Office of Budget and Management 2003. References Abbott, Carl. 1987. The new urban America: Growth and politics in Sunbelt cities. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 1997. The Portland region: Where city and suburbs talk to each other and agree often. Housing Policy Debate 8 (1): 11–51. Adams, James Truslow. 1931. The Epic of America. Boston: Little Brown.

London: Routledge. Klots, Sarah. 2005. Personal communication. May 15, Baltimore, Maryland. Knox, Paul. 2005. Vulgaria: The reenchantment of suburbia. Opolis 1 (2): 33–46. ———. 2008. Metroburbia USA. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kotkin, Joel. 2001. Older suburbs: Crabgrass slums or new urban frontier? Policy Study 285. Los Angeles: Reason Public Policy Institute. Kramer, John. 1972. North American suburbs: Politics, diversity, and change. Berkeley: Glendessary Press. Krone, Emily. 2008. Poverty in the suburbs. [Chicago] Daily Herald, April 16. Available at http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?

Ed. Louis H. Masotti and Jeffrey K. Hadden, 29–50. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. Smart Growth America. 2003. Introduction to smart growth. Washington, DC: Smart Growth America. Available at http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/howtotalk. html. Accessed February 25, 2009. Smith, Neil. 1996. The new urban frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist city. London: Routledge. Smith, Neil, Patrick Caris, and Elvin Wyly. 2001. The “Camden syndrome” and the menace of suburban decline: Residential disinvestment and its discontents in Camden County, New Jersey. Urban Affairs Review 36 (4): 497–531. Squires, Gregory D. 2002.


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

Newsweek in 1972, with tongue in cheek, anointed him “one of the most impressive movers and shakers of subsidized construction since the time of King Tut.”7 Logue got his start in the field at the age of thirty-three, when New Haven’s just-elected reform Democratic mayor, Richard Lee, appointed him to lead the city’s major new urban renewal effort. Like many other midsize, old industrial cities, New Haven had been declining since the 1920s, a situation only worsened by the Great Depression. Although war production had given its increasingly obsolete nineteenth-century-era industries a temporary boost, when World War II ended, the postwar future looked bleak.

Logue’s last major job, from 1978 to 1985, brought him to the destitute South Bronx in a more modest position as the president of the nonprofit South Bronx Development Organization, loosely affiliated with New York City’s municipal government. The shrunken scale of Logue’s South Bronx stage not only resulted from his personal fate in the aftermath of the UDC debacle but also reflected the dwindling role of government—particularly at the federal level—in urban development. In the South Bronx, Logue was forced to operate within a new urban policy regime, allying closely with small-scale community development corporations (CDCs) and squeezing what he could out of the private sector and an emerging new partner on the redevelopment scene, nonprofit organizations like the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which liaised between private contributors and city builders on the ground.

He would soon learn, however, that having friends in high and low places and a comprehensive blueprint on paper was not sufficient to achieve his ambitions. Although Logue frequently spouted a commitment to “planning with people,” the kind of cooperative process that he imagined rarely occurred. Instead, the result was more often a combative negotiation between renewer and renewed. Rarely was any side fully satisfied, but the new urban environment created in Boston long bore the visual imprint of intense contestation followed by compromise. PUBLIC BUILDING TO SPUR PRIVATE SPENDING Talk of creating Government Center had been in the air for decades, and early conceptual plans had even been drawn up under Mayor Hynes. But when Logue began investigating Boston as a consultant in March 1960, commitments were not yet firm and the city’s preferred site of Scollay Square was still functioning as a dense, scruffy red-light district that spread over sixty prime downtown acres.


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If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Brave new frontiers indeed, blurring private and public; an example is The Smart Cities Council, a self-styled for-profit with paying partners to whom it promises “business success” through advocacy and action by acting as “an advisor and market accelerator for jobs and revenue.”13 The partnership of tech firms and cities on which the new urban “smart” is predicated is quite real but needs to be scrutinized as well as celebrated. Real change is taking place. Digital technology is minimally making cities more efficient, communicative, sustainable, and livable, qualifying them as smart. But it aspires to do more than just that. According to former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom or Nigel Jacobs, cochair of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston, far from being just about efficiency, ITC (information and communication technology) can be “a gateway drug for civic engagement.”14 Elaine Weidman, the vice president for sustainable and corporate responsibility at Ericsson Broadband, agrees: “When combined with different types of social media, [technology] is creating radically new ways of engagement.

In Boswell’s London Journal, the young scribe reported in 1763 on how in London he had “discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose.”7 In the same era in Paris, in his Rameau’s Nephew, the philosophe Diderot depicted a character so plastic as to become a literary sensation. Yet Diderot was doing little more than parodying an anomic and scattered new urban man: Nothing is more unlike him than himself. Sometimes he is thin and haggard, like an invalid in the final stages of consumption. You could count his teeth through his cheeks. . . . The next month, he’s sleek and plump, as if he had been eating steadily at a banker’s table or had been shut up inside a Bernadine convent.

Similar complaints have been made about odd/even license plate plans that bar autos from downtown on odd and even days. The wealthy simply have two cars, one with an odd plate, one with an even. 55. Judith N. Shklar, On Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion, London: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 100–101. 56. See William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, New York: Random House, 1997, and The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 57. Michael Cooper, “Few Cities Have Regained Jobs They Lost,” New York Times, Wednesday, January 18, 2012. 58. Report from the National Employment Law Project, New York Times, August 31, 2012, cited in an article by Catherine Rampell, “Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds,” August 30, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/business/majority-of-new-jobs-pay-low-wages-study-finds.html?


China's Superbank by Henry Sanderson, Michael Forsythe

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

At night, he settles down in his makeshift, tarpaulin-covered home that he shares with his wife, two children, and stooped mother. The only light in the surrounding darkness is the gleaming work site across the road for the new sports complex. He has bigger dreams. Once he finishes the house, he hopes to rent part of it out to earn money to help pay the medical insurance that comes with being a new urban citizen. “After we were moved everyone had to depend on themselves to make money,” Li said nearby, drinking a hot, fiery liquor one hot and humid summer night, as fireworks celebrating a marriage lit up the sky in this city in the middle of Mao Zedong’s home province of Hunan. “Without land we had to find our own work.”

That gave it an advantage in funding long-term infrastructure projects that might not generate a return on investment for many years. The bank was simply “the best match” for LGFVs, Gao wrote. And after the chaos of the early 1990s, the central government needed and began to take control of China’s economy. The new urban focus in China in the late 1990s unleashed a wave of state capital boosted by growing Chinese savings. The money stayed inside the system; this time there was no money from foreign investors or foreign banks. CDB, as a policy bank, could not take people’s deposits directly. So the cycle went something like this: the country’s commercial banks used people’s savings to buy bonds sold by CDB on the nation’s bond market where they, the banks, were the main investors.

Within a month of the document’s publication for the stimulus, 18 provinces had proposed projects with a total budget of 25 trillion yuan, over 80 percent of annual GDP.22 The vast majority of the money did not go toward health and education or to households but to infrastructure projects and railways. Nationwide, fixed-asset investment grew 28.8 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2009. In particular, new urban construction projects nationwide rose 87.7 percent year on year, after declining 4.4 percent a year earlier. In two years, 2009 and 2010, China increased its total government debt at the same speed that America did in the five years before the housing market bust in 2007.23 By the end of 2010, local governments were strapped with 10.7 trillion yuan of debt, according to a national audit released in the summer of 2011, nearly a third of the country’s GDP, and analysts were predicting nonperforming loan (NPL) rates at banks of over 10 percent or more for the major state-owned lenders, levels not seen since the days of the state-led bad loan binge in the late 1990s, when NPLs hit 25 percent in 1997.24 Of that total 10.7 trillion, almost half was debts borrowed for new projects since 2009.


pages: 426 words: 118,913

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

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

To that question the answer, according to Léon Krier (who in this agrees with Kunstler) is no. We must follow another design for building, which is also another design for living. We should replace the ‘downtown plus suburbs’ idea with that of the polycentric settlement. If people move out, then let it be to new urban centres, with their own public spaces, public buildings, places of work and leisure: let the new settlements grow, as Poundbury has grown next to Dorchester, not as suburbs but as towns. For then they will recapture the true goal of settlement, which is the human community in a place that is ‘ours’, rather than individual plots scattered over a place that is no one’s.

In reaction to the wilderness culture there has arisen an agrarian culture represented by writers like Wendell Berry and Allen Carlson, and by associations like the National Family Farm Coalition and the Food Family Farming Foundation.341 In reaction to the devastation of the cities there has arisen the New Urbanism movement I discussed earlier, itself anticipated by the seminal Country Club House development of J. C. Nichols in Kansas City. In 1912, shortly after the skyscraper idiom had established itself, Nichols gave a pivotal speech to the National Association of Realtors, of which he was president, advocating low-rise buildings with connected façades, walkable streets, classical details, mouldings, cornices and decorated skylines.

Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, New York, 1991; Paul Barker, The Freedoms of Suburbia, London, 2009. See also Paul Krugman, The Self-Organizing Economy, Cambridge, MA, 1998, on edge cities as issuing from the dialectic of centripetal and centrifugal forces. Howard Kunstler’s response to Bruegmann is well worth reading, and appears in Salmagundi, 152, Fall 2006. 275 The Congress for New Urbanism is an American voluntary association, whose current president is John Norquist, and which is beginning to recruit a following among architects, planners and schools of architecture across the country. For the intellectual reaction against modernist architecture and planning see Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Berkeley, 2002, and Nikos Salingaros, A Theory of Architecture, Solingen, 2006.


From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, classic study, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, New Urbanism, plutocrats, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, young professional

The overall population of Muslim countries increased dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century, forcing many people out of rural areas into crowded cities and towns; the proportion of Muslims living in urban areas rose exponentially between 1950 and 1990. Exposed to the new communications media, the conspicuous consumption of the elites and rampant inequality, many Muslims embraced Islam with a new fervour. Mosques and madrasas sprang up across the new urban landscape. Cheap books and magazines made Islamic piety more widely available and popular Muslim journalists and preachers (few of whom had received the traditional education of the ulema) began to offer a new do-it-yourself Islam to people uprooted from traditional social structures. The pluralization of Islamic authority, of which al-Afghani and Abduh and many other members of the lay Muslim intelligentsia had been the harbingers, was never so accelerated as it was in the last half of the twentieth century.

In countries like Turkey and Egypt, where top-down reforms were imposed by despots, modernization became synonymous with the removal of Islam from the centre of public life, the devalidation of Islamic education and law, and the marginalization of Islamic scholars. As al-Afghani had observed during his travels in the Muslim world, the imperatives of modernization and economic growth imposed by Western powers had radically disrupted the old cohesion of Islamic societies by producing new classes and redistributing power among them. New urban elites emerged from modern educational institutions and bureaucracies, and they tended to have little time for traditional sources of authority. Many of them enriched themselves at the expense of the rural poor. A reservoir of discontent built up, especially among the people most marginalized by this process, such as the clergy, small-town merchants, provincial officials and men from semi-rural backgrounds – the kind of people who hung around al-Afghani.

‘We will have not only a powerful army but also a powerful air force and a powerful navy,’ Mao promised in 1949. ‘Ours will,’ he warned, ‘no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation.’ In less than six decades, history seems to have fulfilled Mao’s hopes. There still exists a great and restless Chinese mass in the countryside, cruelly shut out from the new urban prosperity to which their labour and taxes have contributed so much. Social unrest, environmental decay, corruption and other ills feed on China’s new affluence. Yet China, the biggest exporter and the largest holder of foreign-exchange reserves in the world, increasingly drives the global economy, boosting GDP rates across the world with its hunger for resources and markets.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

On the other hand, the emphasis on interactivity between places breaks up spatial patterns of behavior into a fluid network of exchanges that underlies the emergence of a new kind of space, the space of flows. On both counts, I must tighten the analysis and raise it to a more theoretical level. The Transformation of Urban Form: the Informational City The Information Age is ushering in a new urban form, the informational city. Yet, as the industrial city was not a worldwide replica of Manchester, the emerging informational city will not copy Silicon Valley, let alone Los Angeles. On the other hand, as in the industrial era, in spite of the extraordinary diversity of cultural and physical contexts there are some fundamental common features in the transcultural development of the informational city.

America’s last suburban frontier The image of a homogeneous, endless suburban/ex-urban sprawl as the city of the future is belied even by its unwilling model, Los Angeles, whose contradictory complexity is revealed by Mike Davis’s marvelous City of Quartz.60 Yet it does evoke a powerful trend in the relentless waves of suburban development in the American metropolis, West and South as well as North and East, toward the end of the millennium. Joel Garreau has captured the similarities of this spatial model across America in his journalistic account of the rise of Edge City, as the core of the new urbanization process. He empirically defines Edge City by the combination of five criteria: Edge City is any place that: (a) Has five million square feet or more of leasable office space – the work place of the Information Age… (b) Has 600,000 square feet or more of leasable retail space… (c) Has more jobs than bedrooms (d) Is perceived by the population as one place… (e) Was nothing like ‘city’ as recently as thirty years ago.61 He reports the mushrooming of such places around Boston, New Jersey, Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, Texas, southern California, San Francisco Bay area, and Washington, DC.

He remarks that these ex-urban constellations are: tied together not by locomotives and subways, but by freeways, jetways, and rooftop satellite dishes thirty feet across. Their characteristic monument is not a horse-mounted hero, but the atria reaching for the sun and shielding trees perpetually in leaf at the core of corporate headquarters, fitness centers, and shopping plazas. These new urban areas are marked not by the penthouses of the old urban rich or the tenements of the old urban poor. Instead, their landmark structure is the celebrated single-family detached dwelling, the suburban home with grass all around that made America the best housed civilization the world has ever known.62 Naturally, where Garreau sees the relentless frontier spirit of American culture, always creating new forms of life and space, James Howard Kunstler sees the regrettable domination of the “geography of nowhere,” 63 thus reigniting a decades-long debate between partisans and detractors of America’s sharp spatial departure from its European ancestry.


pages: 598 words: 140,612

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

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

Royal Institute of British Architects. 214 “a monstrous carbuncle on the face”: Ibid. 214 “Why has everything got to be vertical”: Ibid. 214 “a giant glass stump”: Ibid. 214 but the prince won, sort of: “Victoriana vs. Mies in London,” New York Times, May 3, 1984, p. C18. 214 “an early Victorian market town”: Worsley, “A Model Village Grows Up Gracefully.” 214 forces behind the New Urbanist movement: Watson et al., Learning from Poundbury, 8. 214 New Urbanism “stand[s] for . . . our built legacy”: Charter of the New Urbanism, www.cnu.org/charter. 214 more conservationist than the New Urbanist communities of America: Compare the Web site of Poundbury, www.duchyofcornwall.org/designanddevelopment_poundbury_livinginpoundbury.htm, with its note that “It is intended to be a sustainable development” and that it is “designed to maintain the quality of the environment” and its photographs of green space, with the Web site of Celebration, Florida, www.celebration.fl.us/towninfo.html, with its emphasis on its “strong sense of self ” and photographs of people at play. 215 In Celebration, 91 percent of people who leave their homes to work take cars: U.S.

In his agricultural estates in Cornwall, the prince is building his vision of an ideal English town, which has been described as looking like “an early Victorian market town, as if architecture stopped in 1830.” His royal patronage has given a great boost to Leon Krier, Poundbury’s planner, who is also one of the intellectual forces behind the New Urbanist movement. The New Urbanism “stand[s] for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.” Poundbury is considerably more conservationist than the New Urbanist communities of America, such as Seaside, Florida; Kentlands, Maryland; Breakaway, North Carolina; and the Disney Corporation’s town of Celebration, Florida.

Bradley Milwaukee Minneapolis Missouri Mitchell, George Phydias Mittal, Lakshmi Mobutu Sese Seko Mohammed, Sheikh Monkkonen, Eric Montreal Moses, Robert Moving to Opportunity Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mumbai building restrictions in crime in Dharavi neighborhood of disease in traffic congestion in transportation network in Mumford, Lewis murder Murthy, Narayana museums music Mysore Nagasaki Napoléon I, Emperor Napoléon III, Emperor Nashville National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) National Labor Relations Act (1935) Native Son (Wright) neighborhood preservation, see preservation Netherlands Nevins, Allan New Brighton New Deal New Orleans Hurricane Katrina in poor in New Urbanism New York City African Americans in age statistics in Bloomberg as mayor of building construction in Central Park commuting in crime in death rates in decline of entrepreneurs in environmental footprint of fair-housing law in Fifth Avenue Commission in finance in founding of garment and fashion industries in garment worker strike in Giuliani as mayor of globalization and Greenwich Village Harlem Children’s Zone in Harlem Renaissance in health in Hell’s Kitchen housing in immigrants in industries in Koch as mayor of Lindsay as mayor of Lower East Side marital statistics in Midtown Manhattan Penn Station in poor in population explosion in port of preservation in Promise Academy in public transportation in publishing industry in rebirth of restaurants in reverse commuting and rise of September 11 attack on social connections in sprawl in streets in subways in suicides in Tammany Hall in taxes in theater in transit and income zones in travel between Boston and Upper East Side wages in Washington Square water supply for zoning regulations in New York Panorama New York Philharmonic New York State energy consumption in parkway system of New York Times NIMBYism Nimitz, Chester 9/11 attacks Norberg, Karen Obama, Barack Oklahoma City Old Vic Theatre Company Olivier, Laurence Olmsted, Frederick Law Otis, Elisha O’Toole, Peter Otto, Nikolaus Owen, David Paris building regulations in bus transit in Eiffel Tower in housing in La Défense in Montparnasse Tower in paving of planning of police force formed in restaurants in schools in sewage system in transit and income zones in parks Pascal, Blaise patent citations Patni Computers Pedro II, Emperor Penn Station Pennsylvania Railroad Pericles Perlman, Philip Philadelphia Main Line in transit and income zones in water supply in Philip Augustus Phoenix Phukan, Ruban Pinker, Steven Pirelli, Giovanni Battista Pittsburgh plague Plato police policies, see public policies politics ethnic power and social groups and Ponti, Gio populations: loss of new building and wages and Potemkin villages Poulsen, Valdemar Poundbury poverty rural suburban poverty, urban African Americans and and attraction of poor to cities education and in favelas and helping people vs. places in megacities path to prosperity from public policies’ magnification of in Rio slums and ghettos transportation and Prada, Miuccia preservation in New York City printing press prisons Procopius productivity education and geographic proximity and impact of peers on skills and wages and Promise Academy property rights prosperity and wealth education and environmentalism and path from urban poverty to urbanization and Protestantism public policies building restrictions consumer cities and education and environmental; see also environmentalism helping people vs. places immigration and industrial land-use regulations level playing field in national NIMBYism and poverty magnified by preservation, see preservation suburban living encouraged by urban poverty and zoning ordinances, see zoning ordinances public spaces publishing: in New York printing technology and Pulitzer, Joseph quality of life Quigley, John Raffles, Thomas Stamford rail travel Ramsay, Gordon Rand, Ayn Ranieri, Lewis Raytheon recession Reformation Renaissance restaurants Richardson, Ralph Richmond right-to-work states Rio de Janeiro favelas in transportation in riots River Rouge plant Riverside roads asphalt paving for highways New York City streets traffic congestion and, see traffic congestion Robson Square Rochester (Minnesota) Rochester (New York) Rockefeller, Nelson Rogers, Richard Roman Empire Roosevelt, Franklin D.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

One example was Peter Calthorpe, a precocious Palo Alto sixteen-year-old who built geodesic domes in high school with Lloyd Kahn, later the editor of the Shelter section of the Whole Earth Catalog, who went on to live in a commune and produce light shows for several years. He studied architecture and became an urban planner internationally known for the concept of New Urbanism, walkable communities, while he lived as Brand’s neighbor on a houseboat in Sausalito a decade later. Until then, at rock shows put on in places like the Matrix, the audience had remained in their seats as they watched the performers. Now Kesey and the Pranksters were tearing down the walls.

They purchased the Mirene for just $8,000 and then spent the next two years and $180,000 converting her into a houseboat berthed at the South 40 Dock. A decade later they would put the boat back in dry dock and add a new engine as part of making the boat seaworthy again. The South 40 Dock became the best example of what Brand’s friend and neighbor Peter Calthorpe would describe as the “new urbanism.” Calthorpe was inspired in part by living in the houseboat community to realize that “walkability”—the notion that all of the resources a resident might need, from shopping to work and entertainment, were within easy walking distance—was the key to creating a livable community. That insight would be at the heart of Brand’s break with the back-to-the-land movement.

Soon after How Buildings Learn was published, Jacobs wrote to journalist Katherine Fulton, then completing a profile of Brand for the Los Angeles Times Magazine: The reason I used the word “awed” back in the beginning of this letter is that I so much marveled at Stewart Brand’s originality of thought, his common sense raised to the point of wisdom, and his enormous and always specific knowledge that when I closed the book I knew I was reading a classic and probably a work of genius.[13] Genius or not, Brand soon learned that, unlike in the technology world, there were few hefty speakers’ fees available from architects, who proved to be a generally miserly group. Perhaps because unlike in his previous book, he was not extolling the profession but indicting it. Indeed, How Buildings Learn found a much more receptive audience among urban planners than architects. It appeared just a year after the formation of the Congress for the New Urbanism, founded by a group of progressive urban planners, including Brand’s friend Peter Calthorpe. The book sparked a discussion that led to the idea of what are described as “form-based codes” in the planning world—the idea that rather than designing planning codes for land use, regulations should focus on the relationship between facades and scale and public space to create more livable communities.


pages: 297 words: 89,206

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

However, just as we have argued that the fundamental class boundaries lie at the top of the social hierarchy, so the power of this regional divide has now broken down. It has been replaced by two other dynamics: firstly, the power of highly segregated urban cores as elite zones. The process of intense elite segregation can be detected in all major British cities – and that new urban investment has generated more powerful manifestations of this. Secondly the dominance of central London is now paramount and overwhelms that of the north–south divide. These two shifts generate a more powerful urban–rural division than used to be the case. Cities (especially London, but the process extends to other cities) are the centres of accumulation.

Figure 8.5 Percentage Shares of the Elite within Just One Quartile of Postal Sectors in 10 Major Built-up Areas in Britain Source: GBCS data Class and inequality are central to how we conceive of and construct our cities. Class has an interactive relationship with space because those with greater economic capital have greater choice about where. They possess freedoms which the housing market does not extend to those of lesser means. The elite class also have the power to transform and colonize new urban spaces both physically and socially, through processes of top-end ‘gentrification’.13 Mapping where those in the elite live in a detailed way is instructive because it opens up the different forms of ‘elective belonging’ that people hold – the emotional, economic and other reasons that bind them to particular places.14 The Manchester elite exemplifies this geography well, because this is the most segregated in class terms according to GBCS data of British cities.

These overlap, but imperfectly, showing that the wider identities of places cannot be read from their economic capital and prosperity alone. A powerful urban–rural divide, as much as a regional one between north and south, is marked in terms of the way urban centres operate as foci of cultural capital (especially emerging cultural capital) and social capital. And marking out these new urban spaces, we see the power of the elite as having a profound geographical imprint, as this is fundamentally an urban class. The old aristocratic class with roots in the land, at the apex of the class structure, has given way to a more fundamentally urbanized class – though one quite possibly with second homes tucked away in areas of repose.


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

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

This was seen as a defeat of mercantilist economic thought and a triumph for classical economists such as David Ricardo. It was also evidence of the declining political power of the landowners, as the power of industry and cities rose. The two great political reform acts of 1832 and 1867 further shifted the balance of power in parliament in favour of new urban middle and even working classes. By the end of the nineteenth century, as land was slipping out of mainstream economic thinking (see Chapter 3), the political power of the landowning class was diminishing too (Linklater, 2013). Housing supply and tenure The rapid increase in urban populations created a huge demand for accommodation in Britain’s major cities, most of which were not prepared for this increase in population.

Large houses were turned into flats and tenements, and multiple families were crowded into already crammed houses by often unscrupulous landlords who saw an opportunity for quick profit. During this time those who ran the dominant industries in the city often wielded significant power, and much of the housing needs of the new urban workers were met by factory owners who built accommodation near their factories. This housing was cheap and often low quality; there were few building regulations during this time and those that did exist were frequently ignored. Neither older cities like London nor new ones like Manchester had sufficient infrastructure to support such high density urban populations well, and life under these conditions was often harsh.

Leases were often sold for the lifetime of the tenant, giving an appearance of permanence, but landlords were clearly able to extract a high degree of economic rent: the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes (1885) found that almost half of working class households were paying 25–50% of their income on rent alone (Samy, 2015). In part, this was due to the lack of transport, which required industrial workers to live near to the factories that employed them. In the new, urban and industrial economy that had been created, the problem of rent was still alive and well. But now it found its strongest expression in the housing market, rather than in the agricultural fields that Ricardo had originally used to explain his theory. 4.3 1900–1970: world wars and the golden age of capitalism By the dawn of the twentieth century there was an increasing awareness among social and political elites that the social problems of industrial, urban Britain were rooted in the economic and physical organisation of land and property, triggering interest in how these problems could be overcome at a more systemic level (Simpson et al., 1992).


The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

The draft London Plan explained that London’s ‘urban renaissance’ would consist of “making the city a place where people want to live, rather than a place from which they want to escape” (Mayor of London, 2002a). 72 The evolution of London, 1991 to 2015 Such a consensus around urban development would have appeared almost unthinkable during the political antagonism of the late 1980s. Sir Terry Farrell, a prominent architect in London’s new ‘urban renaissance’, has indicated that: “The biggest change of the last 20 years is the move from an era of confrontation over the status of industry and white collar employment, to a phase where by 2010 white collar industries are seen as the saviour of industrial areas.” (Personal communication, 24 January 2012) The broad acceptance that renewal could best be achieved through the recasting of the inner city for knowledge and creative sectors ultimately translated into new investment directives.

Shortly afterwards, Land Securities noted that urban community development now required “innovation, commitment, and partnership with stakeholders”, and Countryside Properties sought recognition “as an innovative, responsible developer . . . 76 The evolution of London, 1991 to 2015 [who] encourage local people to participate in the development process and in the management of community facilities to help promote social inclusion” (Imrie, 2009: 97). These sentiments reflected a step change in the vision and practices of London’s property industry. Since 2007, the specifically environmental elements of sustainability have gained credence as part of a new urbanism which depends on principles of highdensity, urban work–live villages and pedestrian and cycle spaces. The sustainability ambition is fuelled by ongoing investment in London’s transport system, notably the TfL Business Plan, which seeks among other things to reduce car dependency in mid-suburban boroughs and reduce carbon emissions associated with mobility.

Begun in 2001 and completed in 2007, the £800 million redevelopment was designed by Sir Norman Foster, later modified by Alistair Lansley, and aimed to achieve a modern testament to the original Victorian ‘train shed’ structure. The wider King’s Cross redevelopment encapsulates the predominant policy to rely on property development firms to produce new urban land markets with the appeal to attract global investors. In this case, the Argent group has had the responsibility of overcoming local political complexity and boldly recapitalising local land markets. The result has been “the biggest change to the northern edge of the Euston Road since the advent of the railways” (Littlefield, 2012).


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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

But as easy as it is to don a green hat up in Vermont, the beast that is New York City has the tendency to tear that noble lid off and throw it into a puddle of mud. Upon arriving in the big city I struggled to reconcile the environmentally concerned mind-set that comes so effortlessly in a place like Vermont with my new urban lifestyle. Of course sustainable living is easier in a Vermont township, where local produce is plentiful and every backyard is equipped with a compost bin.”12 But this is exactly wrong. “Sustainable living” is actually much harder in small, far-flung places than it is in dense cities. Jervey cites New Yorkers’ “overactive dependence” on fresh water as an example of their supposed wastefulness, and he marvels that the city’s total use “amounts to well over one billion gallons per day.”13 A billion is a big number, to be sure, but New York City’s population is more than thirteen times that of the entire state of Vermont, so the city’s total consumption figures in any category will appear overwhelming in any direct comparison.

Los Angeles is at or near the top of almost everyone’s list of the examples of automobile-dependent development, but L.A. is actually quite dense, as American cities go, with an average concentration, inside the city limits, of just over 8,200 people per square mile, or nearly 13 people per acre. This is fairly close to Zupan and Pushkarev’s critical transit threshold of seven dwellings per acre—and it exceeds the density of many developments that have been promoted as examples of New Urbanism, or Smart Growth—yet only a microscopic percentage of Angelenos travel to work in anything but a car, and, largely because of the separation of uses mandated by local zoning regulations, there are very few parts of the city where transit, bicycling, or walking are feasible as regular means of getting around, no matter what the price of gasoline.

Ryan Chin, a Ph.D. candidate and the project’s coordinator, said, “The idea is to have the vehicle work in unison with its urban surroundings, taking advantage of existing infrastructure, such as subway and bus lines. Ultimately we see this as an effective way to merge mass transit with individualized mobility, creating a new urban transportation ecosystem.”52 But the City Car, as described by its inventors, is a good idea only if you believe that not being able to find a parking space is an environmental problem, and that dense urban areas have something to gain from getting pedestrians off their feet and into cars. Residents of dense urban cores largely get by without individual vehicles now; what would be gained by turning those people into drivers of high-tech golf carts?


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Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton

British Empire, deindustrialization, full employment, garden city movement, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Leo Hollis, manufacturing employment, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Russell Brand, starchitect, systems thinking, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, young professional

The Hulme Tenant Participation Project – an autonomous body funded by City Challenge and the Housing Corporation – was formed to provide at least a semblance of the tenant input which remained, in principle, a significant element of the government’s strategy. Those Byzantine structures did somehow combine to carry out one of the country’s most radical regeneration transformations. In Hulme, ‘new realism’ met the ‘new urbanism’ – the latter an attempt to ‘create a new neighbourhood with the “feel” of a more traditional urban community’.8 The Hulme Crescents went, finally demolished in 1994. What replaced them was a pretty conventional streetscape of red-brick semi-detached homes, terraces and functional low-rise flats: ‘Barratt rabbit hutches’ in Owen Hatherley’s words.9 Beyond this, there lay the commitment, shared by the local council and government, to mixed tenure.

It was an estate with problems, those common to many: ‘high levels of deprivation’ among residents and the design flaws held typical of such designs of the era – ‘poorly defined public and private space … lack of natural surveillance on public routes’ and so on.41 And back in 2002 the council, then in Labour-Liberal Democrat hands, promised residents (about 700 secure council tenants and 140 leaseholders then) ‘the phased redevelopment’ of the estate with ‘modern homes for all existing residents, set in a new urban environment’.42 West Hendon needed work; the council claimed an £11.5 million price tag for bringing the estate up to the Decent Homes Standard. Three-quarters of those balloted – accepting the like-for-like pledge of new homes offered – were happy to offer an ‘in principle’ endorsement. Outline planning permission was granted by the council, now in Conservative control, to the Metropolitan Housing Trust in 2004; a development partnership with Barratt Homes was formed in 2006.

Research has shown, however, that the commonly deployed trope of three workless generations is very largely an urban myth. 2Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Sustainable Communities: People, Places and Prosperity, 2005, 65. 3Madanipour, Cars and Allen quoted in Dave Adamson, The Impact of Devolution: Area-Based Regeneration Policies in the UK (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, January 2010), 9, jrf.org.uk, accessed 14 March 2017. 4Adamson, The Impact of Devolution: Area-Based Regeneration Policies in the UK, 9–10. 5‘Report of the Social Exclusion Unit: A New Commitment to Neighbourhood Renewal National Strategy Action Plan’, Cabinet Office, January 2001, 8, neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk, accessed 14 March 2017. 6Aylesbury Tenants and Leaseholders First website, aylesburytenantsfirst.org.uk, accessed 14 March 2017. 7Christopher Beanland, ‘Channel 4’s Aylesbury Estate Ident Gets a Revamp – Starring the Residents’, Guardian, 14 March 2014, theguardian.com, accessed 15 March 2017. 8Loretta Lees, ‘The Urban Injustices of New Labour’s “New Urban Renewal”: The Case of the Aylesbury Estate in London’, Antipode, vol. 46, no. 4, 2014, 923–4. 9Southwark Council, Aylesbury Area Action Plan, January 2010, 179. 10David Blackman, ‘ “Where Did it All Go Wrong?” in Regeneration’, Inside Housing, 22 February 2002, insidehousing.co.uk, accessed 15 March 2017. 11Southwark Council, Southwark Affordable Rent Product Study July 2015, 5–6, and London’s Poverty Profile: Southwark, londonspovertyprofile.org.uk, accessed 17 March 2017. 12Colin Marrs, ‘Javid Rejects Aylesbury Estate CPO as Breach of Human Rights’, Architects’ Journal, 19 September 2016, architectsjournal.co.uk, accessed 8 June 2017. 13Heygate was Home, ‘Broken Promises’, heygatewashome.org, accessed 8 June 2017. 14Jon Kirk, ‘Welcome to the Aylesbury Estate – Once So Grim its Residents Dubbed it a Hell-Hole’, The People, 24 June 2007. 15Cited in Karl Murray, ‘Understanding the Impact of the Economic Down Turn on BAME Communities: A Case Study of the Aylesbury Estate in the London Borough of Southwark’, Black Training and Enterprise Group, June 2012, 11, bteg.co.uk, accessed 22 March 2017. 16Murray, ‘Understanding the Impact of the Economic Down Turn on BAME Communities: A Case Study of the Aylesbury Estate’, 12. 17Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield Hallam University, ‘The New Deal for Communities Experience: A Final Assessment’ (Department of Communities and Local Government, March 2010), 6, extra.shu.ac.uk, accessed 23 March 2017. 18Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, ‘The New Deal for Communities Experience: A Final Assessment’, 40. 19See Paul Watt, ‘Housing Stock Transfers, Regeneration and State-Led Gentrification in London’, Urban Policy and Research, vol. 27, no. 3, 2009. 20Gene Robertson, ‘Labour’s Legacy’, Inside Housing, 7 May 2010, insidehousing.co.uk, accessed 24 March 2017. 21London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Housing Evidence Base, June 2016, 86, towerhamlets.gov.uk, accessed 27 March 2017. 22Jennifer Maureen Lowe, ‘Social Justice and Localities: The Allocation of Council Housing in Tower Hamlets’, PhD thesis, Queen Mary College, University of London, March 2004, 150–2. 23Tower Hamlets Fairness Commission, ‘Who Lives in Tower Hamlets?


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The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

Adams of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, in their landmark paper on the subject, published in the journal Science more than a half-century ago, concluded that[p]robably there is no historical event of this magnitude for which a single explanation is adequate, but that growing soil salinity played an important part in the breakup of Sumerian civilization seems beyond question.71 It should be noted that increasing salinity of soil led to massive crop failures and a similar entropy crisis in the Indus Valley 4,000 years ago.72 Likewise, archaeologists have found evidence of soil salinity leading to catastrophic crop failure and the abandonment of territory in the ancient Mayan hydraulic civilization in Central America.73 In point of fact, salinization of soil and entropic buildup have been a precipitating factor in the weakening and collapse of complex hydraulic civilizations throughout history, reaffirming the inescapable relationship between increasing energy throughput and a rising entropy debt.74 ALL OF THE GREAT axial movements stressed the importance of the Golden Rule. But it was in Rome that the full impact of the new dictum came to the fore with the rise of a new urban religious sect that would be known as Christianity. The early Christian eschatology represented both the final flowering of the empathic surge of ancient theological times and the bridge to the modern era of humanism and the secularization of empathic consciousness. SEVEN COSMOPOLITAN ROME AND THE RISE OF URBAN CHRISTIANITY THE ROMAN EMPIRE represents the “high watermark” for ancient hydraulic civilizations.

The Romans, by contrast, offered a political and judicial universalism, but their civic gods were too cold and distant to address the angst of an increasingly individualized Roman population in search of personal identification within a larger cosmic story. Neither the Jews nor the cult of the Roman pantheon of gods could provide the new urban population of Rome the very personal spiritual succor they so desperately craved. Rome was ready for the Christian story. Erich Kahler eloquently sums up the historic significance of the rise of Christianity in Rome in the first three centuries of the AD era. The fundamental innovation of this whole epoch is that the individual stands forth, the lonely private individual, with all his ancestral, tribal bonds broken off, the earthly individual standing on his own feet, under the vast sky of universality.

., in his book The Making of the Modern Mind, notes that the reverse flow back from the countryside to the newly emerging towns, with their own unique “vows and obligations,” was to have a profound impact on the whole future course of history. He writes:The rise of the urban civilization, first primarily commercial and later more and more industrial, was the outstanding social force in the later Middle Ages; from it can be traced practically everything that, beginning with the renaissance . . . created modern times.1 The new urban civilization brought with it an empathic surge that would take European consciousness to new heights. The late medieval empathic surge began with a technological revolution in agriculture and a novel harnessing of biological and inanimate energy. The introduction of the horse into agriculture greatly increased agricultural productivity.


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Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep

battle of ideas, British Empire, call centre, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, illegal immigration, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Kibera, knowledge economy, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, urban planning, urban renewal

Many of the new public housing projects in America destroyed intricate communities to make room for buildings designed on an inhuman scale. Still other plans were swiftly defeated by the relentless pressure of human nature. In Tokyo, which was flattened during World War II, planners saw a chance to erase the ancient and convoluted street grid and build what one scholar called “an entirely new urban form,” with a series of dense downtowns “nestled against a background of green space, green corridors and broad tree-lined boulevards.” It didn’t happen. American bombs destroyed buildings, but didn’t destroy the claims of property owners, who resisted giving up their land. It was quicker and easier to build along the old streets.

Ayub Lays Foundation of Korangi Satellite Town,” Times of Karachi, December 6, 1958, 1, 5. 88 “rely on their wits to thrive”: Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961), 46. 88 “migration and employment growth... thereby drawing more migrants”: Peter Morrison, “Migration from Distressed Areas: Its Meaning for Regional Policy” (New York: Ford Foundation, 1973), 17–18. 88 four million people in 1950 to 6.5 million in 1960: United Nations Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision Population Database, http://esa.un.org/wup2009/unup/index.asp?panel=2. 88 “furnaces, sliding doors, mechanical saws”: Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, 1969), 152. 88 “an entirely new urban form”... “broad tree-lined boulevards”: Andrei Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-first Century (New York: Routledge, 2002), 162. 89 Constantinos Doxiadis caught the midnight flight: Doxiadis’s diary, December 15, 1958. 89 Ford had been assisting with planning and development: Doxiadis’s diary, December 15, 1958; also “Design for Pakistan: A Report on Assistance to the Pakistan Planning Commission by the Ford Foundation and Harvard University” (New York: Ford Foundation, February 1965). 89 Doxiadis snapped photos of arid land: Doxiadis’s diary, December 17, 1958. 89 The philosopher Plato spoke to him: Constantinos Doxiadis, Between Dystopia and Utopia (Hartford, CT: Trinity College Press, 1966), x–xi. 90 They worked everywhere from Baghdad to Rio de Janeiro: Doxiadis Associates archive, archive .doxiadis.org; also Between Dystopia and Utopia. 90 “helped resettle 10 million humans in 15 countries”: Time, November 4, 1966. 90 “Several aspects of the problem begin to worry me,”...

New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Nasr, Vali. The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. ———. The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama’at-I Islami of Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. New York: Routledge, 2006. Orangi Pilot Project–Research and Training Institute. Katchi Abadis of Karachi, vol. III. Karachi: OPP-RTI, 2009. Owen, David. Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are Keys to Sustainability. New York: Riverhead, 2009. Raman, T.


Migrant City: A New History of London by Panikos Panayi

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Brixton riot, call centre, Charles Babbage, classic study, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, financial intermediation, gentrification, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, immigration reform, income inequality, Londongrad, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, multicultural london english, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Shamima Begum, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

This is not to deny a continuity of migrant settlement in these big British cities, especially Liverpool, which witnessed black settlement because of its role in the slave trade.187 Clearly London is different because it has always acted as the main area of settlement for most migrant groups who have made their way to Britain. No break exists in this history. This is essentially due to the centrality of London in the economic, political and cultural history of Britain. While the Industrial Revolution gave birth to new urban centres, important medieval and early modern towns such as York, Norwich or Bristol did not experience significant growth. London, on the other hand, expanded at the same time as the great industrial cities mushroomed during the nineteenth century.188 In terms of the continuity of migration, London would also appear fairly unique when making global comparisons.

Social and Generational Change in Interwar British Jewry (Basingstoke, 2017), pp. 149–204. Religion receives more attention in Chapter 8 below. 82. Lynn H. Lees, ‘Patterns of Lower-Class Life: Irish Slum Communities in Nineteenth-Century London’, in Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett, eds, Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (London, 1969), pp. 359–85; ‘The London Irish’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 170 (1901), pp. 124–34; John A. Jackson, ‘The Irish in East London’, East London Papers, vol. 6 (1963), pp. 105–19. 83. Panayi, German Immigrants, pp. 94–8. 84. Count E. Armfelt, ‘German London’, in George R.

Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Immigrants in Victorian London (Manchester, 1979), pp. 94–5. 57. John A. Jackson, ‘The Irish in East London’, East London Papers, vol. 6 (1963), pp. 108–9. 58. Lynn Hollen Lees, ‘Patterns of Lower-Class Life: Irish Slum Communities in Nineteenth-Century London’, in Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett, eds, Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (London, 1969), pp. 368–9. 59. Charles Manby Smith, Curiosities of London Life, or, Phases, Physiological and Social, of the Great Metropolis (London, 1853), pp. 135–8. 60. Gerard Leavey, Sati Sembhi and Gill Livingston, ‘Older Irish Migrants Living in London: Identity, Loss and Return’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 30 (2004), pp. 767–9. 61.


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Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar

These New Urbanists reverse a trend followed by each generation since the end of World War II. For more than 60 years, people migrated out of cities, into suburbs. Today, instead of opting for freestanding single-family homes surrounded by lawns, fences and chirping birds, this emerging generation is massively opting for less pastoral—and more stimulating—urban settings. New Urbanism is changing American demographic trends. Multiple reports, including those from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Brookings Institution, see multiyear trends where cities are growing younger and more affluent, while suburbs are shrinking, aging and experiencing increases in poverty. New Urbanists lead contextual lives in cities being planned, designed and rebuilt with contextual technologies.

New Urbanists are active proponents of safer streets, reduced pollution, transparent government and neighborhood activism. They are using contextual technologies as power tools for change. Their shopping—even when local—is becoming mobile device-centric. They are encouraging and adopting new services that allow local merchants to deliver goods to urban doors. New Urbanism is not only taking hold in such cultural centers as New York and San Francisco, but also in previously forsaken places like Pittsburgh, Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio, which is reporting a significant growth in young adults, spawned in part by a tech center that employs more than 300 people, mostly recent college grads.


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Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon

active transport: walking or cycling, book value, British Empire, business cycle, City Beautiful movement, classic study, conceptual framework, credit crunch, gentleman farmer, it's over 9,000, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, New Urbanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, short selling, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, zero-sum game

“The time is rapidly approaching,” wrote the Northwestern Lumberman in 1889, “when the city demand will be much more important than that in the rural districts.”209 Cities, and especially Chicago, had become the centers for great concentrations of wealth, and the wealthy were likely to spend huge sums on mansions and other expensive structures for which white pine was hardly needed. How fortunate, then, that just as the northern forests were disappearing, “hardwoods have come in and pine has been in a great measure ruled out”—a wood unworthy of the new urban elite.210 Demand for cheaper lumber would continue to come from people building the growing numbers of working-class houses in the city, as well as the prosperous farmers living in the immediate vicinity of Chicago, so lumber dealers could look forward to ongoing business from those markets as well.211 And what of the ravaged pinelands to the north?

Ebner, “ ‘In the Suburbes of Toun’: Chicago’s North Shore to 1871,” Chicago History 11, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 66–77; the special suburban theme issue of Chicago History 13, no. 2 (Summer 1984); and Ann Durkin Keating, Building Chicago: Suburban Developers & the Creation of a Divided Metropolis (1988). The best one-volume synthesis of American suburban history nationwide is Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985); on the aesthetics and ideology of the romantic suburb, see David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (1986); and James L. Machor, Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America (1987); see also Henry C. Binford, The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815–1860 (1985); Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987).

Bullough, “ ‘It Is Better to Be a Country Boy’: The Lure of the Country in Urban Education in the Gilded Age,” Historian 35 (1973): 183–95; Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth Century America (1975); Adrienne Siegel, The Image of the American City in Popular Literature, 1820–1870 (1981); David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (1985);Schuyler, New Urban Landscape; and Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. For a useful perspective on this tradition in relation to Chicago, see Carl S. Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880–1920 (1984). 85.“Don’t Leave the Farm,” Bulletin of the Executive Committee of the State Grange of Wisconsin 4, no. 8 (Aug. 1878): n.p. 86.R.A.C.


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Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

She hated Robert Moses’s overarching plans for New York not because they were mandated by the government but because they were overarching plans—and, more specifically, because they called for “slum clearance” and “urban renewal” that did not respect rights and interests of the people already living in a neighborhood. The new urbanists recast the communitarian Jacobs as a libertarian, and her appreciation for bottom-up natural urban development as an endorsement of the free market. Entirely omitting her call for slow, natural growth of urban districts, new urbanism now amounts to little more than a euphemism for totally planned shopping malls with apartments over the stores. Our digitally inflected world-builders take this a step further, leveraging their billions not just to lobby the government for the legal claim to the future, but to serve as evidence of their own competence.

., “Panic at Prodigy,” October 3, 2019, https:// globalpropertyinc .com /2019 /10 /03 /panic -at -prodigy /. 118   “game of life” : “Akasha—The Game of Life,” https:// www .playakasha .com, accessed August 10, 2021. 119   “exponential technologies … moonshots” : Singularity University, “An Exponential Primer,” https:// su .org /concepts /, accessed August 10, 2021. 119   “entrepreneurial leaders … planetary scale” : Singularity University, “Singularity University,” https:// su .org /, accessed August 10, 2021. 120   MacArthur Foundation : MacArthur Foundation, “100 & Change,” https:// www .macfound .org /programs /100change /. 122   She hated Robert Moses’s : Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (New York: Random House, 1992). 123   new urbanism now amounts to : Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How Corporatism Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Random House, 2009), 74–83. 124   Rutt has applied : Jim Rutt, “A Journey to Game B,” Medium , January 14, 2020, https:// medium .com /@memetic007 /a -journey -to -gameb -4fb13772bcf3. 125   President Eisenhower : Center for the Study of Digital Life, http:// digitallife .center /, accessed August 10, 2021. 125   “Yet in holding scientific” : Dwight D.


A History of British Motorways by G. Charlesworth

New Urbanism, North Sea oil, restrictive zoning, the built environment, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, urban renewal

The report of the Committee was published in 1972'2 and the reports prepared by the project team and consultants in 1973'9. In their report the Committee emphasised that by their terms of reference they were concerned with major new urban roads and were not confined solely to urban motorways. The Committee considered that a new approach to urban road planning was needed and that planning of major new urban roads should form an integral part of planning the urban area as a whole. This was not a new idea but the Committee put emphasis on the need to include indirect costs in assessing projects and on the importance of taking fully into account the views and values of people affected by road schemes.

The Buchanan Repore in 1963 stated" ... the ability to command the comprehensive development or redevelopment of large areas is extremely important to the successful handling of motor traffic". These views were restated in 1972 by the Urban Motorways Committee l2 who said "We regard it as essential that the planning of new urban roads should form an integral part of planning the urban area as a whole; and that the indirect costs and benefits of building urban roads should be looked at with the same care as the direct cost and movement benefits ... ». These various statements were made before the reform of local government took place in 1974 (in Greater London in 1965), that is at a time when statutory responsibility for town planning was spread among a large number of authorities.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

.), lean and efficient system of, 40, 41–43 Victorian Era, virtues of, 286 Vishny, Robert, 146 Voltaire, on the best of all possible worlds, 135 Voting Rights Act, 300 wage gap, 286 wage-price spiral, 126, 127 wage stagnation, 92, 168, 288, 289 Wallace, George, 310 Wall Street Journal, The, 271, 273, 279–80 Warren, Elizabeth, 210, 211–12, 238–40, 309 Washington Post, The, 303 wealth distribution: historical estimates of, 270 and income inequality, 274–75, 282, 284 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 132 wealthy: and capital gains, 273 concentration of, 238, 349 conservatives, 149 cutting taxes on, 4, 7, 20, 30, 51, 69, 196, 199, 200, 201, 215–17, 218–20, 221–23, 224, 227, 229, 236–37, 308, 309, 351, 355, 370, 371 donors to Republican Party, 370 exploding incomes of, 92, 283 health coverage for, 36, 39 idolizing of, 94 incentive effects on, 235 and income distribution, 265–66, 266, 267, 269–70, 273; see also income inequality income from assets, 221, 233 income from earnings, 349 increasing taxes on, 66, 211–12, 220, 238–40, 307, 309, 310, 324, 380 as Masters of the Universe, 270 and monopoly power, 236 optimal tax rates on, 235–37, 236 “stealth politics” of, 240 tax avoidance vs. evasion by, 349–50 as too rich, 274–75 and Trumpism, 343 Weigel, Dave, 28 welfare, 126 West Virginia, Republican Party in, 359 What’s the Matter with Kansas? (Frank), 302 When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (Wilson), 286–87 “Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?” (Dew-Becker and Gordon), 283 Whitaker, Matthew, 333 white nationalism, 343, 346, 360 “Why Not the Worst?” (Krugman), 343–44, 350 wildfire, growing risks of, 332 Will, George, 381 Wilson, William Julius, 292 When Work Disappears; The World of the New Urban Poor, 286–87 wing-nut welfare, 303 Wisconsin, Republican Party in, 369 Wolfe, Tom, Bonfire of the Vanities, 262, 270 Wolff, Edward, 270 working class: anti-worker bias in politics, 290, 318, 351–53 falling incomes of, 96, 244 family values of, 286 and health care, 352 and income inequality, 259–60, 272, 273 and “skills gap,” 167–68 stagnating wages of, 92, 168, 288, 289 tax increases on, 20, 221–23 and trade war, 372 and unions, 218, 289–90, 317 work opportunities available to, 286–87, 292 World Trade Organization (WTO), 247, 252 World War I, war debts from, 254 World War II: postwar economic growth, 219, 234 postwar trading system, 244, 250 wage controls in, 270 Wren-Lewis, Simon, 5, 385–86 “WSJ calculation,” 280 Yellen, Janet, 97 Yunus, Muhammad, 388 Zandi, Mark, 113 “zero lower bound” interest rates, 142–43, 153 zombie ideas: on climate change, 4 cutting taxes on the rich, 4, 215–17 eating people’s brains, 3–4 and health care, 216 on impossibility of universal health coverage, 4 invasion of, 259 in movement conservatism, 8 and racism, 4 Zucman, Gabriel, 238–39, 349 ALSO BY PAUL KRUGMAN End This Depression Now!

Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that. One more thought: The real winner in this controversy is the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson. Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, Mr. Wilson published When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group—say, working-class whites—experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

The rest of the world wasn’t far behind: Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso, 2006). “hyper-city,” a locale with a population above 20 million: Ibid, p. 5. By 2050: UN Population Division, World Urbanization. professor Richard Florida: Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis (Basic Books, 2017). See also: Richard Florida, “The Roots of the New Urban Crisis,” Citylab, April 9, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/the-roots-of-the-new-urban-crisis/521028/. In 2016, the Brookings Institute: Jesus Leal Trijullo and Joseph Parilla, “Redefining Global Cities: The Seven Types of Global Metro Economies,” Global Cities Initiative, 2016. See: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/metro_20160928_gcitypes.pdf.


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

That lost decade worked to drivers’ advantage: cleared land could provide much-needed parking lots. In Buffalo, a chamber of commerce staff member observed that so many buildings had been demolished it looked like the city was paving the way not for cars to park but for airplanes to land. Many architects believed they were planting the seeds of new urban growth. John Follett, for example, a partner at John Graham & Co. who worked on Portland’s Lloyd Center mall (eight thousand parking spaces), saw the fields of asphalt as a Gruenesque opportunity. “Since the shopping centers of today will eventually become urban centers, the acres we now devote to automobile parking should be supplanted by multilevel structures, so that the land thus freed can be occupied by future buildings.”

Carter was not the first person to think critically about the role of neighborhood churches in big cities. Tim Keller, a prominent advocate for urban ministry in New York, argued churches were not keeping up with the way young people wanted to live. Eric Jacobsen, a pastor in Tacoma, Washington, had developed a theory of an “embedded church” that was rooted in the concepts of New Urbanism, the school of antisprawl architecture. An embedded church, Jacobsen said, should be in a neighborhood with homes and businesses. It should have a direct connection to the street. It should deemphasize the parking lot. Those visions meshed with Carter’s own. It was with Berry on his mind that he stumbled upon a faded storefront church on Roosevelt Road.

Preservationists who wished to see old buildings find second life and antipreservationists who wanted to see new buildings everywhere. Free marketeers who wanted dynamic parking pricing, and good-government advocates who wanted revenue for public improvements. The “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) prohousing activists. The small-city restorationists of the Strong Towns movement. Architects who subscribed to the Congress for New Urbanism, the movement for traditional town building founded by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany, who with Jeff Speck called parking minimums the “single greatest killer of urbanism in the United States today.” Chrissy Mancini Nichols was working for the Chicago Metropolitan Planning Council, a regional think tank, when parking started getting in the way.


pages: 224 words: 69,494

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

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

Just as stories about life in the 1950s reveal the emptiness and sham of stories around the wonderful things that flow from higher mobility so the same stories tell us that there are many examples of sustainable cities and child friendly cities and they did exist and we did destroy them. If we really do want to restore this kind of world with all its benefits we can only do so if we redefine our love affair with mobility, redefine it as an historical blip, show how lower mobility produces magnified benefits and embed 21st century “new” urban thinking in a strong low mobility context. That is the objective of this book. During the development of these ideas in the next 14 chapters it will be important to keep uppermost in our minds the very clear implication of “low mobility”. Low mobility is a decoupling concept. This book argues that we must decouple mobility from its association with progress, happiness and quality of life.

This will not “sit well” with the world view of most of us in 2015 but the point of this book is to demonstrate that a low mobility world has a great deal to offer and its opposite is a logical impossibility. We cannot accommodate an annual average percentage increase in distance travelled for all 7 billion of us so we may as well start explaining, designing and delivering a low mobility alternative. It could not be clearer that most governmental statements in the UK about new urban design or so-called “active” transport (this means walking and cycling) are meaningless unless we engineer this paradigm shift from high mobility to low mobility. Such a paradigm shift also involves a shift in language. The phrase “low mobility” whilst accurately describing a world characterized by fewer kilometres travelled per person per annum fails to convey the richness of a world characterised by many more destinations opportunities within a much smaller physical area and a world where enormous amounts of time and money (and pollution) are not devoted to the business of accessing distant places.


pages: 421 words: 120,332

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

This is partly because of the described growth of urban economies, and partly because demand for farm labor falls as agriculture commercializes, mechanizes, and becomes export-oriented. Worldwide employment in agriculture is falling fast and in 2006, for the first time ever, it was surpassed by employment in the services sector.46 And because every new urban resident is also a new urban consumer, the cycle is self-reinforcing. More urbanites buy more electronics, services, and imported processed food, prepared and served to them by others. More entry-level jobs for new migrants are created. More managerial posts are needed. Ladders rise and the urban economy grows .47 This urban shift is driving major demographic changes around the globe.

Under the conservative ground rules of our thought experiment, it’s hard to envision how so many problems can be eliminated overnight. By 2050 I imagine much of sub-Saharan Africa—the cradle of our species—to be a dilapidated, crowded, and dangerous place. Shifting Economic Power Not only is the geography of the world’s urban population shifting, so also is its wealth. The economic impact of nearly two billion new urban consumers in Asia has not gone unexamined by economists. Unlike the situation in Africa, there is every indication that the rising Asian cities will be modern, globalized, and prosperous. In a thoughtful, forward-looking assessment the U.S. National Intelligence Council writes:65 The international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2025. . . .


pages: 423 words: 129,831

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, big-box store, blue-collar work, congestion pricing, Donner party, edge city, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, Ralph Nader, side project, smart transportation, Southern State Parkway, streetcar suburb, traveling salesman, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen

Interregional Highways included no maps of routes through cities, and no description of them beyond a catalog of possibilities, because the problems of extending four- and six-lane highways through dense settlement were simply too complicated and too local to generalize—besides which, it was a decision best made by the states and municipal authorities. " How near they should come to the center of the area, how they should pass it or pass through it, and by what courses they should approach it, are matters for particular planning consideration in each city," the committee decided, though it observed that surface streets carrying the heaviest traffic loads generally " pass through or very close to the existing central business areas." Fairbank again did most, if not all, of the writing, and this time his passages on urban expressways included a cautionary note. However they were located, the new urban highways would do more than simply carry traffic; they would be " a powerful influence in shaping the city," the report predicted, and " should be located so as to promote a desirable development or at least to support a natural development rather than to retard or to distort the evolution of the city

Or in the second installment, when he castigated highway engineers for behaving "as if motor transportation existed in a social vacuum" and "building more roads, bridges, and tunnels so that more motorcars may travel more quickly to more remote destinations in more chaotic communities, from which more roads will be built so that more motorists may escape from these newly soiled and clotted environments." "Our transportation experts are only expert whittlers," he wrote, "and the proof of it is that their end product is not a new urban form but a scattered mass of human shavings. Instead of curing congestion, they widen chaos." Or in the series' third part, where he pointed out that the "fancy cures that the experts have offered for New York's congestion are based on the innocent notion that the problem can be solved by increasing the capacity of the existing traffic routes, multiplying the number of ways of getting in and out of town, or providing more parking space for cars," when the reality was that the city screamed for redesign and the dispersal of its crowd-generating employers, stores, and public amenities.

"In the utopia that highway engineers have been busily bulldozing into existence, no precinct of the city and no part of the surrounding countryside are to remain inaccessible to automobile traffic on a large scale," he wrote. "As a formula for defacing the natural landscape and ruining what is left of our great cities, nothing could be more effective." *** The most surprising critic of the new urban highways was the man who'd spurred their financing. It's hard to imagine how Dwight Eisenhower could have been unaware that the interstate system was designed to venture into cities, what with all the fuss in San Francisco, the controversies unfolding in Baltimore and other towns, and newspaper chatter on the paths of proposed freeways just blocks from the White House—not to mention that he'd signed the 1956 act and presumably read something about it beforehand.


pages: 440 words: 128,813

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg

carbon footprint, citizen journalism, classic study, deindustrialization, digital rights, fixed income, gentrification, ghettoisation, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, loose coupling, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, postindustrial economy, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, urban renewal, War on Poverty

For Chicago, with its famously divided segments, its infamous segregation, and its stark inequality, is not only the quintessential American city of extremes. It is also the city in and through which scholars founded and developed the American approach to urban studies, creating an agenda for investigation in the urban environment that shaped much of twentieth-century urban social science. Although in recent decades scholars associated with the new urban sociology have levied compelling criticisms of the Chicago school’s “urban ideology”—most notably its failure to call attention to the political and economic production of inequality and domination in the city—the Chicago techniques for exploring the social fabric of the city offer rich possibilities for discovery.

Velkoff, Victoria, and Valerie Lawson. 1998. International brief: Gender and aging: caregiving. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Venkatesh, Sudhir. 2001. Chicago’s pragmatic planners: American sociology and the myth of community. Social Science History 25, no. 2:276–317. Wacquant, Loïc 1994. The new urban color line: The state and fate of the ghetto in PostFordist America. In Social theory and the politics of identity, edited by Craig Calhoun. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. . 1996. The rise of advanced marginality: Notes on its nature and implications. Acta Sociologica 39:121–39. . 1997a. For an analytic of racial domination.

Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana. Reprint, Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1996. When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Alfred Knopf. Wirth, Louis, and Eleanor Bernert. 1949. Local community fact book of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolf, Jacquelyn, Naomi Breslau, Amasa Ford, Henry Ziegler, and Anna Ward. 1983. Distance and contacts: Interactions of black urban elderly adults with family and friends.


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

If your job was in a factory or in some retail concern in the city, “work” was now a place to go to, a separate world outside the home. Cities became more differentiated into areas for working, living, and shopping. Driving this evolution was the rise of the factory as the center of economic life. “The main elements in this new urban complex,” wrote the fabled urbanist Lewis Mumford, “were the factory, the railroad and the slum…. The factory became the nucleus of this new organism. Everything else was subordinate to it.”10 Early factories were concentrated in and around the core of the city. But as the scale of production grew larger, some moved to the outskirts of towns where larger plots of land could be assembled.

Don’t expect the federal government or anyone else to save your city or bring back your industries. “It is that the old world will inevitably disappear, and that creating a new one is up to you, not someone else.” One response to the problems of rusted-out industrial cities such as Detroit has been a new urban reclamation effort called “shrinking cities.”19 The idea, perhaps inspired by Pittsburgh, has caught on in smaller cities in the American Midwest, such as Youngstown, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan, and their European counterparts. The basic notion is that older industrial cities need not grow to improve.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Port cities and entrepôts such as Dubai act like twenty-first-century Venice: They are “free zones” where products are efficiently re-exported without the hassles of government red tape. Such mega-cities as Rio, Istanbul, Cairo, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Manila are the leading urban centers of their countries and regions, yet each teems with hundreds of thousands of new urban squatters each year. The migrant underclass lives not in chaos and “shadow economies” but often in functional, self-organizing ecosystems, the typical physical stratification of medieval cities. Whether rich or poor, cities, more than nations, are the building blocks of global activity today. Our world is more a network of villages than it is one global village.

.: Lynne Rienner, 2007. Mueller, John. The Remnants of War. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. Munzele Maimbo, Samuel, and Dilip Ratha, eds. Remittances: Development Impact and Future Prospects. Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2005. Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. New York: Routledge, 2006. Newman, Edward, Ramesh Thakur, and John Tirman. Multilateralism Under Challenge? Power, International Order, and Structural Change. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2006. Nicolson, Harold. Diplomacy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1939. ———. The Evolution of Diplomatic Method.


pages: 246 words: 76,561

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

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

This exchange of ideas between Brazil and Colombia, along with the unexpected use of cable car systems in the slums of Caracas, Medellín and now Rio, and the experimental housing methods introduced in Chile and Argentina, are all evidence of a continent-wide programme of reform. They also amount to a new urban repertoire. If there is one area where the Latin American experience contains a global lesson, however, it is in its attitude to the informal city. What do we mean by ‘informal’? The short answer is slums. The slums are not defined as informal because they have no form, but because they exist outside the legal and economic protocols that shape the formal city.

Merwill’s own bedroom is tiny, with just a single bed on which he, his girlfriend and their son sleep. His parents are in another room, his sister and her daughter are in another, and his brother and his girlfriend are in another. ‘This is normal for 23,’ he says. Merwill, who is thirty-one and works for Avila TV, a new ‘urban’ station that frequently airs programmes about life in the barrios, grew up around drugs and violence. There used to be twenty-five other kids in this block of his age, but most of them were killed. Getting into music saved him, he says. 23 is famous for its music. Several renowned salsa musicians live here.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

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

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

Cities through most of history did not expand beyond easy walking distance.6 London did not grow beyond the original ‘square mile’ until the seventeenth century. And while the physical extent of the city was curtailed by a lack of modern transportation, its population density was curtailed by the elevated risk of infectious disease that came with crowding. The result was that new urban areas were formed once existing ones had outgrown their manageable scale. Early in the development of Ancient Greece, for example, the Delphic oracle would regularly order the dispersal of cities that grew to an unwieldy scale, giving shape to the patchwork of city-states that defined that civilization.7 The early settlers of New England followed a similar model.8 Throughout history, many argued that cities were an unnatural state for humanity, a culmination of our exile from the Garden of Eden.

., 1845, The Condition of the Working Class in England (reprint by Perlego, 2005, accessed online at Perlego.com). 8 Clossick, ‘The Industrial City’, in Knox (ed.), Atlas of Cities, p. 78. 9 Sinclair, U., 1906, The Jungle (reprint by Open Road Media, 2015, accessed online at Perlego.com). 10 Clossick, ‘The Industrial City’, in Knox (ed.), Atlas of Cities. 11 Florida, R., 2017, The New Urban Crisis (Basic Civitas Books). 12 The Dearborn Independent, 1922, Ford Ideals (Dearborn Publishing Company). 13 Huber, M., 2013, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press), p. 73. 14 Morphet, J., 2013, ‘A city-state?’, in Bell, S. and Paskins, J. (eds), Imagining the Future City: London 2062 (Ubiquity Press). 15 de Vise, P., 1976, ‘The suburbanization of jobs and minority employment’, Economic Geography, Vol. 52, No. 4. 16 Hobbs, F. and Stoops, N., 2002, ‘Demographic trends in the 20th century’, US Census Bureau (census.gov). 17 Cited in Wilkerson, I., 2016, ‘The long-lasting legacy of the Great Migration’, Smithsonian Magazine. 18 Wilson, W., 1987, The Truly Disadvantaged (University of Chicago Press). 19 Rajan, R., 2019, The Third Pillar (William Collins). 20 Hannah-Jones, N., 2019, ‘It was never about busing’, New York Times. 21 Clark, W., ‘School desegregation and white flight: a re-examination and case study’, Social Science Research, Vol. 16, No. 3. 22 Rhodes, J. and Brown, L., 2019, ‘The rise and fall of the “inner city”: race, space, and urban policy in postwar England’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 45, No. 17. 23 Ehrenhalt, A., 2013, The Great Inversion (Vintage). 24 Edlund, L., et al., ‘Gentrification and the rising returns to skill’, NBER working paper. 25 Authors’ calculations based on Zillow data and US Census population weightings. 26 Autor, D., et al., 2017, ‘Gentrification and the amenity value of crime reductions’, NBER working paper. 27 Gropius, W., 1969, ‘Principles of Bauhaus production’, in Wingler, H.


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

By diminishing public space, the automobile has made once great cities terrible places to live. This book also tells the story of some very good ideas. Around the world, energetic and idealistic people are working hard to reclaim neighborhoods once left for dead. The movement goes under a variety of names: transit-oriented development, smart growth, new urbanism. In the wrong mouths, these are just buzzwords; in the wrong hands, they can serve as the justification for boondoggles as bad as any hastily thrown-up boomburg. But the advocates of livable cities and walkable small towns may be on to something—by investing in development that includes well-conceived transit, we can create more sustainable and, crucially, more civil communities.

Guttfreund, Owen D. 20th-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ladd, Brian. Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automobile Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Lewyn, Michael. “Debunking Cato: Why Portland Works Better than the Analysis of Its Chief Neo-Libertarian Critic.” Congress for the New Urbanism, http://www.cnu.org/node/1533. McNichol, Dan. The Roads that Built America: The Incredible Story of the U.S. Interstate System. New York: Sterling, 2006. Mirk, Sarah. “The Dead Freeways Society: The Strange History of Portland’s Unbuilt Roads.” Portland Mercury, September 24, 2009. Montgomery, Charles.

“Portland Improvement.” http://www.portlandonline.com/bps/index.cfm?a=148065 &c=44077, 1943. Palahniuk, Chuck. Fugitives & Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon. New York: Crown Journeys, 2003. Ozawa, Connie, ed. The Portland Edge. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004. Pobodnik, Bruce. “Assessing the Social and Environmental Achievements of New Urbanism: Evidence from Portland, Oregon.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, 2009. Schrank, David, et al. “2010 Urban Mobility Report.” Texas Transportation Institute, http://tti.tamu.edu/documents/mobility_report_2010.pdf. Seltzer, Ethan. “It’s Not an Experiment: Regional Planning at Metro, 1990 to Present,” in The Portland Edge, ed.


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The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Scores of downtown areas made the transition from "centers of production and distribution of material goods to centers of administration, information exchange and higher order service provision."24 The emerging knowledge-based industries have meant increased jobs for highskilled white collar and service workers. For large numbers of AfricanAmericans, however, the new urban renaissance has only served to accentuate the ever widening employment and income gap between highly educated whites and poor unskilled blacks. The only Significant rise in employment among black Americans in the past twenty-five years has been in the public sector: more than 55 percent of the net increase in employment for blacks in the 1960s and 1970S occurred there. 25 Many black professionals found jobs in the federal programs spawned by the Great Society initiatives of President Lyndon Johnson.

Millions of unskilled workers and their families became part of what social historians now call an underclass-a permanently unemployed part of the population whose unskilled labor is no longer required and who live hand-to-mouth, generation-to-generation, as wards of the state. A second smaller group of black middle-class professionals have been put on the public payroll to administer the many publicassistance programs designed to assist this new urban underclass. The system represents a kind of "welfare colonialism" say authors Michael Brown and Steven Erie, "where blacks were called upon to administer their own state of dependence."28 It is possible that the country might have taken greater notice of the impact that automation was having on black America in the 1960s and 1970s, had not a significant number of Mrican-Americans been absorbed into public-sector jobs.

Boggs, James, "The Negro and Cybernation," in Lauda, Donald P., Advancing Technology: Its Impact on Society (Dubuque: W. G Brown Company, 1971) p. 154. 23. Wilson, Declining SignifICance of Race, pp. 111-112. 24. Kasarda, John D., "Urban Change and Minority Opportunities," in Peterson, Paul E., ed., The New Urban Reality (Washington D.G: The Brookings Instutition, 1985), p. 33· 25. Brown, Michael, and Erie, Steven, "Blacks and the Legacy of the Great Society," Public Policy, vol. 29, #3, Summer 1981, p. 305. 26. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population, 1960 and 1970, Subject Reports, Occupational Characteristics, in Wilson, William Julius, Declining Significance of Race, p. 103. 27.


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

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

Cramer ’s “Funkytowns” covers many more towns and cities and, as one reviewer suggested, it should be placed in the glove compartments of all rental cars. Philip Langdon’s A Better Place to Live is a painstaking examination of how to “retrofit” American suburbs and when we come to the necessary matter of rewriting the building and zoning codes, this book should be one of the primers. Peter Katz’s The New Urbanism details and illustrates two dozen developments and redevelopments. It represents our architects’ best attempts at recreating community. A closing essay (an Afterword) by Vince Scully deserves careful attention. Recently appearing and already in its second printing is Richard Sexton’s Parallel Utopias which looks deeply into the thinking behind, and execution of, two notable attempts at creating community today.

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

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


pages: 58 words: 18,747

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

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

According to Shiller, this tendency makes the land speculation issue a red herring in terms of house prices: “There will be a natural process of finding ways to build homes on less land, or less expensive land. This can be achieved either through building higher-density housing, such as more and taller apartment buildings or infill development in urban centers, or founding new urban areas.” Indeed, the United States still has plenty of empty space. So one could always respond to complaints about the rent being too high by suggesting that you move or build elsewhere. The rent may be too damn high in Santa Monica and Seattle, but it’s a good deal cheaper in Sioux Falls. Different pieces of land have different characteristics.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

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

University of British Columbia’s Jamie Peck has described the current fashion of focusing on hipsters and the affluent as a “biscotti and circuses” approach that exacerbates poverty and inequality in urban centers.40 “To put it in political speak,” notes urban thinker Aaron Renn, “the creative class doesn’t have much in the way of coattails.” The new urbanism is a new, and equally ineffective, form of “trickle-down economics.” Even Florida, the guru of the “creative class,” admits that the benefits of the urban strategies he advocates “flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional, and creative workers.” Yet many cities, including some unlikely cultural centers such as Detroit or Cleveland, have adopted the idea that sponsoring artists and “hip” urbanism are the keys to civic success.41 It seems clear that the current recipe for urban growth is destined to preserve and expand inequality, largely ignoring the needs of the lower and working classes.

James Howard Kunstler, “The Ghastly Tragedy of the Suburbs,” TED2004 Conference, February 2004, http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia; Leslee Goodman, “The Decline and Fall of the Suburban Empire,” interview with James Howard Kunstler, The Sun (magazine), October 2009, issue 406. 81. Irvin Dawid, “New Urbanism Examined by Time Magazine, Andrés Duany,” Planetizen, December 24, 2007, http://www.planetizen.com/node/29063; Brian Stone, “Land Use as Climate Change Mitigation,” Environmental Science and Technology, November 12, 2009; Ronald D. Utt, “The Oberstar Transportation Plan: A Costly Exercise in Lifestyle Modification,” Heritage Foundation Web Memo, November 10, 2009. 82.


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Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

Immersion in their private worlds, writes the Berkeley sociologist Claude Fischer, probably goes hand in hand with alienation from public life. Moral suasion has failed to increase our level of engagement in local institutions, where democracy takes root. But cultural values, and exhortations to change them, are not the only influences on our everyday social routines. As proponents of the New Urbanism movement have demonstrated, people with the same interest in social connection, community building, and civic participation have varying opportunities to achieve those things depending on the conditions in the places where they spend time. The social and physical environment shapes our behavior in ways we’ve failed to recognize; it helps make us who we are and determines how we live

But the most notable improvements in academic achievement are concentrated in schools that have doubled down on the places where face-to-face interaction between teachers and students happens regularly. Small, intimate settings where people get to know one another well are not only ideal places for young people to develop skills for civic engagement and community building but also ideal places to learn. * * * In the 1980s, when American political leaders had grown anxious about a new “urban underclass” and local governments throughout the country deployed armed security guards to monitor high school campuses, public schools—particularly those in poor areas—had ceased to be ideal places for anything. With metal detectors at the gates and pass cards restricting the circulation of students, educational institutions had come to resemble prisons.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

frsc=dg%7Ca 278  World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, Highlights (New York: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2014). https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf 279 Ibid. 280 Ibid. 281 Howard French, “How Africa’s New Urban Centers Are Shifting Its Old Colonial Boundaries,” Atlantic, 1 July 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/how-africas-new-urban-centers-are-shifting-its-old-colonial-boundaries/277425 282  World Population Prospects, 2017 Revision (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs/Population Division, 2017). https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp 283 “China vs.


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The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

Despite their high estimate of their moral self-worth, this proposal for an ethically just and economically efficient tax is likely to be greeted with self-righteous outrage. But recall, since we are taxing economic rents, the predictable arguments about disincentives and desert are self-serving: prepare for an avalanche of ‘motivated reasoning’. Taxation is not only analytically warranted: it is a fitting response to the new urban arrogance. REGENERATING PROVINCIAL CITIES: ‘SHACKLED TO A CORPSE’? How can cities like Sheffield, Detroit and Stoke be revived? The purpose of taxing the metropolis is not to finance welfare benefits for the inhabitants of these places, but to meet the costs of restoring them as clusters of productive work.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107, pp. 657–76. Towers, A., Williams, M. N., Hill, S. R., Philipp, M. C., and Flett, R. (2016), ‘What makes the most intense regrets? Comparing the effects of several theoretical predictors of regret intensity’. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, p. 1941. Venables, A. J. (2018a), ‘Gainers and losers in the new urban world’. In E. Glaeser, K. Kourtit and P. Nijkamp (eds.), Urban Empires. Abingdon: Routledge. Venables, A. J. (2018b), ‘Globalisation and urban polarisation’, Review of International Economics (in press). Wilson, T. D. (2011), Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By. London: Hachette UK. Wolf, A. (2013), The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women has Created a Far Less Equal World.


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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

The American health crisis is predicted to be the single greatest drag on the nation’s economy in the decades ahead. We’ve watched for years as our investments in medicine have principally made medicine more expensive. It’s time to invest in walking. * * * Notes 1. L. Frank, keynote (18th national conference of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Atlanta, May 2010). 2. J. Gehl, Cities for People (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2010), 111. 3. N. Peirce, “Biking and Walking, Our Secret Weapon?,” Citiwire.net, July 16, 2009. 4. T. Gotschi and K. Mills, Active Transportation for America (Washington, D.C.: Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, 2008), 44. 5.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The takeaway lesson is that a democratic form of self-management and governance designed to pool and share “commons” resources proved to be a resilient economic model for surviving a despotic feudal system that kept people locked in bondage. The great Enclosure Movements across Europe that led to the downfall of feudal society, the rise of the modern market economy, and eventually the capitalist system, put an end to rural commons but not the sharing spirit that animated them. Peasant farmers took their lessons learned to the new urban landscapes where they faced an equally imposing foe in the form of factory overlords of the industrial revolution. Urban workers and an emerging middle class, like their peasant serf forbearers, pooled their common resources—this time in the form of wages and labor skills—and created new kinds of self-governing Commons.

This period saw the flowering of what historians call the Northern Renaissance—an awakening of the arts, literature, scientific experimentation, and exploration of new worlds. By the late medieval era, more than a thousand towns had sprung up across Europe, each bustling with economic activity. Aside from providing granaries, lodging, and shops, these urban centers became the gathering place for craftsmen of all stripes and shades. These new urban jurisdictions were often called free cities, as they were deemed independent of the reach of local lords. For example, it was customary practice that if a serf were to escape the feudal commons and take refuge in a nearby town for a year and a day, he would be deemed free, having safely left one jurisdiction and taken up residence in another.21 The craftsmen in the new towns organized themselves into guilds by trade—metalworkers, weavers and dyers, armorers, masons, broiders and glaziers, scriveners, hatters, and upholsterers—in order to establish quality standards for their goods, set fixed prices for their products, and determine how much to produce.

Private property exchanged in the market economy was henceforth “taken for granted as the fundamentals upon which social organization was to be based, and about which no further argument was admissible.”7 Max Weber was even more harsh, arguing that the replacement of spiritual values with economic ones in the changeover from a Christian-centered universe to a materialist one represented “the disenchantment of the world.”8 In fairness, it should be noted that despite the terrible toll in human suffering brought on by the enclosure of the commons and the letting loose of millions of peasants from their ancestral land to make their own way in a new urban world not yet ready to absorb their labor, the shift to a market economy did eventually improve the lot of the average person in ways that would be unfathomable to families living on the feudal commons. The shift from a purely market-exchange economy in the late medieval era to a capitalist economy by the mid-nineteenth century posed serious problems in regard to the notion of property.


pages: 91 words: 24,469

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla

affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Gordon Gekko, It's morning again in America, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior

They lived in actual or de facto gated communities where they never learned to take a stroll and meet people, and where the sight of a lone child walking to school would bring concerned calls to the police, who would scold the parents for taking such a risk. Eventually the kids went to college, often far away, and after graduation joined the new urban class of independent twenty- and thirtysomethings with no responsibilities to anyone but themselves. They visited their parents and siblings on rushed visits over the holidays; otherwise they just kept in contact online. Until they finally got married, moved to the suburbs, and the whole cycle began again.


pages: 101 words: 24,949

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City by Jack Brown

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Etonian, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, knowledge economy, lockdown, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, post-war consensus, quantitative easing, remote working, Richard Florida, sceptred isle, superstar cities, working-age population, zero-sum game

Moore, ‘London as a separate city-state? The capital needs to check its privilege’, Guardian, 25/6/16. 56.H. Pidd, ‘Don’t sneer at northerners for voting for Brexit – there are sound reasons’, Guardian, 9/12/16. 57.G. Clark & T. Moonen, World Cities and Nation States, op. cit., p.41. 58.Ibid. 59.R. Florida, The New Urban Crisis: Gentrification, Housing Bubbles, Growing Inequality, and What We Can Do About It (London: Oneworld, 2017), p.19. 60.G. Clark & T. Moonen, World Cities and Nation States, op. cit., p.15. 61.G. Rachman, ‘Urban-rural splits have become the great global divider’, Financial Times, 30/7/18; and D.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The development of canals and railroads meant that shipping goods inland from the Eastern seaboard ports, which had been almost impossible in the eighteenth century, now took less than a week.6 Americans could communicate with unprecedented ease due to the development of the telegraph and the steam-powered printing press.7 The rate of growth of gross domestic product per capita doubled from 0.5 percent per year to almost 1 percent per year. At the same time, the concentration of populations in new urban areas presented problems of crowding, disease, lack of clean water, and lack of sanitation.8 The demand for, and possibility of producing, ever more cotton with slave labor led to the physical expansion of the United States. It also led to the increasing significance of the United States in the share of the world’s cotton production.

There would still be a vast, silent, and automatic system directed against men and women of color,” he wrote.33 Not everyone agreed that the causes of African American poverty were environmental rather than internal. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965) sparked a debate about the social pathologies of the new “urban underclass.” The report, which at least in part blamed female-led families, single mothers, and welfare dependency for black urban poverty, produced an uproar because it was viewed as both patronizing and incorrect. Moynihan hoped that following his prescriptions would lead to a greater focus on providing jobs for African American men and increase the number of families with two parents, but his ideas were lost in the controversy over affixing blame.34 WAR ON POVERTY The discourse on inequality in the 1960s coincided with, and encouraged, major government efforts to counter its effects.


pages: 329 words: 88,954

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

Here and only here, does one find such organized collective aggression by a specialized military force as one finds first in the ancient cities.” Mumford, 1961, 46. This constitutes one: Information about the history of Manchester from Marcus, 5–6. “From this foul”: Quoted in Marcus, 15. “Considering this new urban area on its lowest physical terms, without reference to its social facilities or its culture, it is plain that never before in recorded history had such vast masses of people lived in such a savagely deteriorated environment, ugly in form, debased in content. The galley slaves of the Orient, the wretched prisoners in the Athenian silver mines, the depressed proletariat in the insulae of Rome—these classes had known, no doubt, a comparable foulness; but never before had human blight so universally been accepted as normal: normal and inevitable.”

New York: Vintage, 1986. Karsai, Istvan, and John W. Wenzel. “Productivity, individual-level and colony-level flexibility, and organization of work as consequences of colony size.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 95 (1998): 8665–69. Katz, Peter. The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community. New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.: McGraw-Hill, 1994. Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994.


pages: 291 words: 88,879

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

big-box store, carbon footprint, classic study, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, employer provided health coverage, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, young professional

Some questions are sociological: Does living alone mean something different now that we’re hyperconnected, through cell phones, social media, and the like? Has the fast growth of living alone among young adults led them to prioritize their personal development and avoid participating in communities and groups? Or has it paved the way for new “urban tribes” to replace the traditional families that, as so many of us know from experience, often break apart? Do the social networks formed by contemporary solo dwellers survive when participants marry, move, grow old, or become ill? If not, what happens to those who stay on their own? Some questions are political: Will the growing ranks of people who live alone develop a collective identity and, as some prominent strategists believe, establish themselves as a lobbying group or voting bloc?

The single girl “has a better sex life than most of her married friends,” Brown claimed (albeit without providing any evidence). “She need never be bored with one man per lifetime. Her choice of partners is endless and they seek her.”22 The private apartment, writes the literature scholar Sharon Marcus, became a powerful symbol of the new urban culture during the 1960s because it “offered the single girl an eroticized arena in which to exercise her creativity and promote her own creative comforts.”23 But few single women expected to maintain this arena for long. Brown, after all, proposed living alone not as a means to subverting marriage but rather as a means to improving it.


pages: 286 words: 95,372

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

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

They had come there, and had changed it from a basically traditional city ringed with semi-rural suburbs into a vast metropolis stretching for mile after unchanging mile, a phenomenon then unique in the world. Only in the twentieth century have other countries emulated it. It seemed as if the creation of this new urban habitat, once started, could not be stopped, however much people might lament the loss of the landscapes of their youth. And people did lament. Typical of many was the florid complaint of one Edwin Roffe, who grew up among leaves and streams such as Crosby depicted, but in middle age found himself in a different world: Bricks!

Some people thought they were Maoists and others that, on the contrary, they were not all that different in their basic attitudes from the Mission Hall clergymen of a hundred years ago. But nearly everyone was pleased when, in 1974, they succeeded in opening a riding stable, allotments and a miniature ‘farm’ (goats, chickens, a donkey, a calf) on a segment of railway land with old stabling and stock sheds. It was an inspired idea. As a symbol of the new urban peasantry, as a focus for the idea of the village that lurks disguised in city streets and as a means of creating a sense of the revival of the lost past, it could not be bettered. Look, it seemed to be saying, the fields are not only sleeping underneath: they are here, exposed once again, with people working in them, tending animals, learning about real things, doing things instead of gazing into shop windows and television sets.


pages: 304 words: 88,773

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

Those newly free-floating laborers became another, equally essential, energy source for the Industrial Revolution, filling its cities and coketowns with a nearly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. In a sense, the Industrial Revolution would have never happened if two distinct forms of energy had not been separated from the earth: coal and commoners. The dramatic increase of people available to populate the new urban spaces of the Industrial Age may have had one other cause: tea. The population growth during the first half of the eighteenth century neatly coincided with the mass adoption of tea as the de facto national beverage. (Imports grew from six tons at the beginning of the century to eleven thousand at the end.)

“Cholera: Molecular Basis for Emergence and Pathogenesis.” FEMS Immunol. Med. Microbiol. 18 (1997): 241–48. Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961. Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. New York: Routledge, 2005. Nightingale, Florence. Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1992. Owen, David. “Green Manhattan.” The New Yorker, October 18, 2004. Paneth, Nigel. “Assessing the Contributions of John Snow to Epidemiology: 150 Years After Removal of the Broad Street Pump Handle.”


pages: 347 words: 86,274

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion by Virginia Postrel

Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Dr. Strangelove, factory automation, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, hydroponic farming, indoor plumbing, job automation, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, washing machines reduced drudgery, young professional

The pursuit of happiness largely superseded the pursuit of immortality. Here emerged the culture that fostered what Colin Campbell calls “modern, self-illusory hedonism.” Contemplating the future enjoyment of goods and experiences became one of the “pleasures of the imagination,” a characteristic eighteenth-century expression. This new urban glamour was more banal than its predecessors, but also more benign. It could therefore appeal to a vastly larger audience. Among the objects of glamour was the city itself, as seen or imagined from afar. Considered at a distance, the great metropolis shimmered in the imagination like the Emerald City rising before Dorothy and her companions—the representation of all that was marvelous, mysterious, and missing from the audience’s life.

Lynn Pan, Shanghai Style: Art and Design between the Wars (South San Francisco, CA: Long River Press, 2008) p. 127. The story, titled “Country Scenes,” was originally published in the February 1935 issue of Art and Literature Pictorial. 3. For an extensive discussion of Francophile intellectuals in Shanghai, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 4. Pan Ling, In Search of Old Shanghai (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., 1982) p. 58. Pan is better known under the English version of her name. 5. Dany Chen, “A Curator’s Notes—Women in Shanghai, Part 1,” Asian Art Museum Blog, April 29, 2010, http://www.asianart.org/blog/index.php/2010/04/29/a-curators-notes-women-in-shanghai-part-1/. 6.


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

“I think if Harvey hit Houston today, it would be worse,” says Brody. If you live somewhere like central London or Manhattan, what is happening in Houston may feel, well, thousands of miles away. In those cities car lanes are being taken away from roads to build cycle lanes, and congestion charges are spreading. It is easy to find stories about new urban advancements. The socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has promised to wage war on the car, scrapping street parking to make space for bike lanes. Amsterdam has been pedestrianizing main roads since the 1970s. But in fact, such stories are interesting because they are rare. In most of the world the car is quietly becoming ever more dominant.

(Rural roads are the least safe, at a rate of almost two deaths per one hundred million miles.) Superficially, then, making urban roads more like highways is the way to make them safer. This sort of thinking has led roads in many American suburbs and newer cities to be designed like highways. The most common type of new urban form is what Charles Marohn, an urbanist highway engineer, calls a “stroad.” This is halfway between a road and a street. That is, it is designed for cars to move fast (to get somewhere, along the road), but it also has businesses, homes, and the like all along it (like a street). Stroads are essentially highways within cities.


pages: 301 words: 90,276

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

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

Lupa, “The Decade in Housing Trends.” 21.  Joint Center for Housing Studies, America’s Rental Housing 2020 (Harvard University, 2019), https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/reports/files/Harvard_JCHS_Americas_Rental_Housing_2020.pdf. 22.  Randy Shaw, Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); and Patrick Sisson, Jeff Andrews, and Alex Bazeley, “The Affordable Housing Crisis Explained,” Curbed, May 15, 2019, https://www.curbed.com/2019/5/15/18617763/affordable-housing-policy-rent-real-estate-apartment. 23.  National Low Income Housing Coalition, Out of Reach (2020), https://reports.nlihc.org/oor/about. 24.  

Laugh Floor Montana Moore, Charles Moore-Willson, Minnie moratorium Morgan Stanley Mormon Church mortgage moteliers motel landlord “motel-Patel” motels as affordable housing option association criminal activity in designated as extended stay designed to meet customer needs evictions families living together in as low-income housing projects motorists in occupancy rates public health self-perception among motel dwellers as warehousing for working poor Mulligan’s Murrin, Greg and Linda Nana, KJ Nashville, Tennessee National Association of Real Estate Brokers National Association of Realtors National Homes Guarantee National Low Income Housing Coalition National Old Trails Road National Press Photographers Association Negrin, Metin NeoCity Ñeta Association Netflix Netherlands Nevada New 21st Century Public Housing Vision New England “new homeless” See also homeless New Jersey New Mexico New Urbanism New York New York City New Yorker Ninth Circuit Ninth Congressional District “nontransient occupancy” nonurban housing crisis See also housing North Carolina Northeast District Northeast Oregon Northern Virginia North Florida North Ranch Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria Occidental College Oconee Creek offenders Ohio Oklahoma Old Town One Stop Housing Opalka, Jesse opioid crisis Orange Blossom Family Health Orange County, Florida Orange County Housing Trust, California Oregon Organize Florida Orlando, Florida Orlando-Kissimmee tourism corridor Orlando Sentinel Osceola County, Florida commercial to industrial land use Comprehensive Plan evictions fair market rent higher-wage employment household incomes housing problems jobless rate low-income housing projects motel owners owners’ right to evict Parkway planners tax collector tourist attractions urban grown boundary (UGB) vacation homes Osceola County Ninth Circuit Court owners business condo corporate mom-and-pop motel multiunit second-home stores and restaurants ownership shift Oxy Express Oyo Hotels and Homes Palm Beach County, Florida Palm Motel pandemic.


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Berlin Now: The City After the Wall by Peter Schneider, Sophie Schlondorff

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, young professional

The sale, which was made at a time when hardly anyone believed in an imminent end to the divided state of Germany, let alone in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, was a bold—a prophetic—investment. Indeed, it was driven more by a political vision than by commercial interests. Edzard Reuter, who was the son of West Berlin’s legendary first mayor, Ernst Reuter, wanted to build not only a new Daimler headquarters here but a whole new urban area, which would—at some distant point in the future—be connected to East Berlin. Rarely has the CEO of a major group been so right about a decision that many of his business colleagues greeted with smirks. Reuter himself was surprised by how quickly his bet paid off. The plot of land, which he bought for 93 million deutsche marks, is now one of the most valuable properties in Berlin.

He gathered the best minds of his generation around him and, in just a few short decades, succeeded in establishing the incomparable Florence. To build a marvelous city like Florence, Piano said, you need a great deal of power, a great deal of money, but more than anything you need passion and a willingness to play hard. What worried him was the incredible speed at which new urban entities arise. In his view, the constant and worldwide revolutionizing of construction materials, computer-programmed building techniques, and new transport routes had resulted in an unprecedented acceleration of construction processes and endless possibilities. This material revolution, Piano said, virtually precluded the biological growth of cities: “This is the first time in history that you can produce an entire urban area in five to ten years.


pages: 550 words: 89,316

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

As Jennifer Williams, the former ballet dancer and co-founder of Pop Physique, remarked of her time as an instructor at The Bar Method, initially she wore nondescript workout clothing, but in the early 2000s, as she taught barre class in San Francisco, Williams noticed, “Every woman in the class had those pants with the little symbol. I realized ‘I have to have those pants.’” Those pants, Lululemon’s Groove Pant, is the signature piece of the company’s collection and materialized as the badge of the new urban conspicuous leisure. The pants are indeed very flattering (black, bellbottom style, and made of a thick spandex blend that sucks everything in). Still, the Groove Pant requires one to actually work out to look good in them and to have the financial means to purchase a pair (they sell for $100 per pair, and one presumably needs more than one pair if exercising several times a week).

Louis also undertook a renaissance—retrofitting industrial lofts for residential living, bringing more amenities into the city, paving bike paths and pedestrian-friendly walkways to attract members of the creative class (thought to be the lifeblood of the new economy).13 Local politicians and developers advocate for active street life, coffee shops, and live music as a part of the new urbanity. Countless new-build developments around the country in both urban and suburban areas offer residential, shopping, and restaurants as a combined experience for the consumer. While some of these developments are in downtown (Zappos’ founder Tony Hsieh’s Las Vegas Downtown Project, Chicago’s New City, or the Los Angeles Staples Center), many simply replicate the downtown experience with sidewalks, outdoor music, and cafés and apartments overlooking the “street life” (Santana Row in Silicon Valley, the Grove in Los Angeles, or the uber-luxury Bal Harbour shops in Florida).


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

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

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

By 1979 the area that was first confiscated for urgent military requirements had been transformed into colonies, such as Matityahu, Neve Zuf, Rimonim, Beit El, Kochav Hashahar, Alon Shevut, Elazar, Efrat, Har Gilo, Migdal Oz, Gitit, Yitav, Qiryat Arba and others. Some of them had grown into little towns and others remained small communities. This new urban sprawl served not only the purpose of territorial expansion of the Jewish State, but also provided major observation and monitoring centres in the midst of the mega-prison the Israelis had built. The Likud government did, in fact, obey one injunction by the Supreme Court that had pronounced the transformation of military bases into colonies illegal.


pages: 349 words: 98,309

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

As part of the sharing economy’s casualization of labor, many long-held assumptions about the American workplace and the redeeming qualities of work are overturned. WORK AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO CRIME OR ENABLING CRIMINAL ACTIVITY? William Julius Wilson, in When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, writes that it’s the loss of manufacturing jobs, along with white flight from cities, that led to the deterioration of African American families and an increase in the crime rate. Without jobs, the logic goes, there are few ways to make money—and little incentive to marry. And without the social stability of marriage and work, there are fewer social controls preventing crime, both in terms of personal deterrents and “old heads” who can talk down the young men who may be considering a life of crime.1 The answer, meanwhile, is promoted in every American economic development plan: bring in industry, bring in job opportunities, and the crime rate will drop.2 The increasing employment levels of the late 1990s are even regularly offered as a reason behind the resulting crime drop.

., Mary Blair-Loy, and Jennifer L. Berdahl. 2013. “Cultural Schemas, Social Class, and the Flexibility Stigma.” Journal of Social Issues 69:209–34. Williams, Mike, and D.A. Farnie. 1992. Cotton Mills in Greater Manchester. Lancaster, UK: Carnegie. Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Vintage. Wingfield, Nick, and Mike Isaac. 2015. “Seattle Will Allow Uber and Lyft Drivers to Form Unions.” New York Times, December 14. Wise, Scott, and Jon Burkett. 2016. “‘He Was Trying to Kill Me’: Uber Driver Attacked on I-95.” WTVR.com, April 25. Worstall, Tim. 2016. “US Median Household Income Is Now Back to Pre-recession Peak.”


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

An improvement over its low-density predecessor (bottom half), microsprawl (upper half) is defined by large tracts of higher-density housing accessed by personal rovers and software-train mass transit. DASH MARSHALL. At first glance, automation looks like a force multiplier for transit-oriented development. Prominent urban planners like Peter Calthorpe, a founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, have embraced the synergy of software trains and compact neighborhoods. It’s easy to imagine driverless shuttles playing a role in linking satellite neighborhoods designed without cars in mind—boasting more footpaths and less parking, for instance. That’s the thinking behind Switzerland’s Les Vergers Ecoquartier, a 1,200-unit sustainable housing development at the edge of Geneva that’s connected to downtown transit by robovans.

Will autonomists like Ng launch a new campaign to stigmatize those who stand in the way of self-driving machines? Many architects and urban designers seem willing to pave the way for AVs at our expense. Separation is everywhere in today’s visions of the self-driving cities of the future. The original master plan for Nanshan Center, a new urban district in the Chinese boomtown of Shenzhen, is a good example. As first drawn by the architects at design powerhouse Kohn Pedersen Fox, it puts AVs on a dedicated elevated platform. (Pedestrians would themselves be channeled to yet another separate guideway on the elevated structure.) While it claims inspiration from New York City’s High Line, this seemingly futuristic scheme is as old as the motor car itself—the Regional Plan Association’s 1924 vision for New York “argued for dense multilevel traffic and transit solutions that separated levels of rail, wheeled vehicles, and pedestrians with upper-level domains of gracious sun-lit plazas and sheltering loggias” (Figure 8-6).


pages: 162 words: 34,454

Mad Mobs and Englishmen? Myths and Realities of the 2011 Riots by Steve Reicher, Cliff Stott

Brixton riot, Deng Xiaoping, Fellow of the Royal Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), New Urbanism

See http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/sir-hugh-orde-water-cannon-make-for-good-headlines-ndash-and-bad-policing-2335676.html. 219. For an account of the violence, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2004/jun/16/euro2004.sport19. For a description and analysis of the faciliatory strategy, see O. Adang and C. Cuvelier, (2001) Op cit. (note 23). 220. D.O. Sears and J.B. McConahay, The Politics of Violence: The New Urban Blacks and the Watts Riot (Boston, Mass: Houghton-Mifflin, 1973). 221. See D.O. Sears, (1994) Op cit (note 5) 222. See J. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (London: Penguin, 1963/1964). Table of Contents Title page Copyright page Contents Acknowledgements Dedication page Preface Chapter 1: A Story Full of Sound and Fury Chapter 2: Lessons from the History of Riots Chapter 3: Understanding Urban Riots Chapter 4: Four Days in August Chapter 5: Conclusion References


pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Robert Stern, once a board member of the Disney Corporation, now Dean of Yale University’s School of Architecture, is the author of the introduction to Krier’s most recent book and the architect of the presidential library of George Bush the Younger in Texas. And Krier has disciples everywhere from Florida to Romania. He is the father of what his American followers like to call the New Urbanism: of which the Prince of Wales’s development project at Poundbury outside Dorchester, is the prime British example. In argument, Krier takes no prisoners, and apparently accepts no compromises. He certainly has no fear of unfashionable causes. He has written at length of his most dubious architectural hero, Albert Speer, whom he purports to see as the last great hope of classical urbanism.

Naturally, ‘the idea of replacing the world’s rich panoply of traditional architecture by a single international style is dangerously insane’, an observation which, given that it would be all but impossible to find anyone who would suggest such a thing, seems a little redundant. However, it is possible to see a certain family resemblance between the languid village hall in Florida designed by Krier and his work on the Italian town of Alexandria. Krier set out to provide a primer for the New Urbanism. ‘The lack of clarity in the vocabulary, the mixing-up of terms, and the extensive use of meaningless professional jargon stand in the way of clear architectural and environmental thinking … I shall now define some of the main concepts and notions.’ Pay attention at the back: ‘The terms “modern” and “modernist” are regularly confused.


pages: 641 words: 182,927

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

The ascendancy of the northeastern region of the United States ended in the second half of the twentieth century, as manufacturing centers like Pittsburgh and Detroit withered and as cities in other regions such as Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, and San Diego surged, becoming hubs of information technology, aerospace, the military, and leisure activities. By 1990 only four of the ten largest cities—and none of the fastest-growing ones—were located in the northeast.47 New York City remained the primary economic center of the nation, but decentralization brought new urban rivalries. Because New York comprised a decreasing share of the U.S. population and was remote from the fastest-growing regions of the country, its manufacturers and retailers were at a disadvantage in serving national markets. And while the damage to the New York City corporate headquarters complex slowed after the 1970s, the enlargement of southern and western cities offered corporations more alternatives to Manhattan for their home office sites.48 Great wealth became more broadly dispersed.

Social Register Association, Social Register, New York, 1949, (New York: Social Register Association, 1948). 93. N = 201. Ibid. 94. N = 338, HHEP. 95. This residential pattern of a new uptown neighborhood arising simultaneously with new suburbs was not unique to New York. In Pittsburgh in the 1880s and 1890s, some upper-class families moved from their old quarters downtown and in Allegheny City to new urban neighborhoods in the East End of the city that boasted large houses and mansions positioned closely together on rectilinear blocks. At the same time, others relocated to Sewickley, an upper-class railroad suburb. In Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, Buffalo, New Orleans, and Milwaukee, urban upper-class residential districts survived until at least the mid-twentieth century, even as elite suburbs sprouted on the outskirts.

., 105 Lamont, Thomas W., 271 late-17th-century New York, 14–15 late-18th-century New York, 66–69 late-19th-century New York. See Gilded Age (late-19th century) late-20th-century New York: accrued social power in, 329–42; antielitist turn, 316–21; apparent decline of, 311–13; economic changes in, 313–14; new urban rivalries, 314–15; responses to antielitism, 321–29; transition to modernism, 300–311 Lawrence, John L., 198–99 Lay, Julia, 136–37 Lee, Richard Henry, 68 lesser merchants, 16–17 levees, Washington’s institution of, 70, 71–73 Lewis, Sinclair, 289 liberation movements, 303 Lincoln, Abraham, 145 literary works: on the dangers of Wall Street, 93–96; histories of New York, 154–55 Liu, Alex, 354 Lives of American Merchants (Hunt), 85 Livingston, Kathryn, 326 Livingston, Maria, 52, 53 Livingston, Philip, 77 Livingston, Robert R., 45, 51 Livingston, William, 1–2, 13–14, 51–53 Livingston Manor, 52–53 Livingston party (patriots), 18, 51–53 Lodge, Abraham, 26 London Gazette, 15, 40, 367n32 Lord & Taylor’s department store, 213, 214 Lorillard, George, 97 Lorillard, Peter, 97–98 Lorillard, Pierre, IV, 289 low-income families.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

A study of ‘social protest’ in north German towns between 1815 and 1848 has estimated that forty-one incidents of violent collective action arose from economic issues, sixty-three from clashes with authority, nineteen from quarrels between guilds, and thirty-five from struggles over political rights. In the south German state of Baden over the same period, research has uncovered over a hundred violent collective protests, seventy-five of them directed at trying to protect the privileged status of guildsmen. Protest expressed not the despair of uprooted landless labourers or a new urban underclass, but the community spirit of specific groups of craft workers or villagers attacking outsiders whom they blamed for their plight, whether bailiffs, merchants, gamekeepers, foreigners or, as in Germany, Jews. Harsh actions by the police could sometimes spark violent incidents, as in Cologne in 1846 when several young people were arrested for letting off fireworks during a religious festival and rioted in protest.

In the Swiss city of Basel the patrician elite, which had formed a closed corporation earlier in the century, still provided more than half the members of the ruling institutions in the 1890s even after a reform carried out in 1875 had introduced a democratic element into the city’s political system. Nevertheless, the old patrician elite was in effect merging into a new urban middle class as its legal privileges were gradually eroded. In the Adriatic seaport of Trieste, whose population grew from 45,000 in 1815 to 230,000 a century later, the self-co-opting patriciate lost power as a new constitution was passed in 1838 that made provision for the election of ‘people … on the basis of intelligence, knowledge, personal services and gifts’ as well as for those passing the minimum qualifications of wealth and property.

The consequences, as the economist and circuit judge Joseph Kay (1821–78) observed, were particularly unfortunate as the lower classes flocked into the new industrial towns. ‘In England,’ he noted in 1850, ‘it may be said that the poor have now no relaxation but the alehouse or the gin palace.’ Alcohol was the lubricant of industrialization. Pubs and bars proliferated in the new urban world. In the industrial French department of the Nord there was already one bar for every forty-six inhabitants in 1890, catering for the thirst of the predominantly urban working-class population. By 1910 the French were drinking nearly 5 billion litres of wine every year, though very often it was watered down by both the growers and the barkeepers, so that it was not always very potent.


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

Modern technology offers an alternative way to rethink the city where the internet, computing and ubiquitous data transform the places where we live as well as how we work. How can the phone in your pocket improve the world? How have the things that we now take for granted – text messaging, social networks, sat nav – changed the lives of millions? We are at the beginning of a new urban era in which technology can create smart cities, where information can regulate the metropolis. Perhaps this latest era of technology offers the key to the true potential of the city. In parts of Nigeria, the mobile phone is called oku na iri, ‘the fire that consumes money’; nevertheless this simple piece of equipment has had a huge impact on the developing nations of Africa.2 Since 2000, the rapid escalation of mobile technology across the continent has been extraordinary: in 1999 only 2 per cent of the total population had access to mobile phones; by 2010 this had risen to 28 per cent; adoption has been at twice the speed found elsewhere in the world, growing at approximately 45 per cent a year.

This appears to promise the best of all possible places, inspired by the finest examples of architecture from around the world, smarter than any previous city in order to make the mundane moments of urban living run smoothly: improving traffic congestion; energy efficiency and smart buildings; enhanced security and surveillance. The instant city, super-smart, built from the ground up from a masterplan is, for many, the vision of the future, the latest version of a hi-tech Utopia, and it can be found across Asia. Songdo is not alone in attempting to find a new urban order, and many of the latest cities sound more like aisles in an electronic store than metropolitan areas: Putrajaya and Cyberjaya form part of the Multimedia Super Corridor in Malaysia, built in the last decade out of land previously covered by rubber plantations. Mentougou Eco Valley has been designed west of Beijing by the Finnish architect Eriksson as a beacon of what a city could be.


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The role of the class monopoly rent that is then gained from rising land values and property prices in cities like New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, London and Barcelona is hugely important for capital in general. The gentrification process that is then unleashed is, worldwide, a critical part of an economy based as much on accumulation through dispossession as on creating wealth through new urban investments. In cultivating monopoly power, capital realises far-reaching control over production and marketing. It can stabilise the business environment to allow for rational calculation and long-term planning, the reduction of risk and uncertainty. The ‘visible hand’ of the corporation, as Alfred Chandler terms it, has been and continues to be just as important to capitalist history as Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’.7 The ‘heavy hand’ of state power exercised broadly in support of capital also plays its part.

Dispossession and destruction, displacement and construction become vehicles for vigorous and speculative capital accumulation as the figures of the financier and the rentier, the developer, the landed proprietor and the entrepreneurial mayor step from the shadows into the forefront of capital’s logic of accumulation. The economic engine that is capital circulation and accumulation gobbles up whole cities only to spit out new urban forms in spite of the resistance of people who feel alienated entirely from the processes that not only reshape the environments in which they live but also redefine the kind of person they must become in order to survive. Processes of social reproduction get re-engineered by capital from without.


pages: 265 words: 15,515

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

New to the post-Civil War industrial city was a growing spatial separation of work from the home, and this gave rise to a new configuration of city space, which now combined a set of predominantly industrial or commercial zones with a patchwork of specifically residential neighborhoods. Whether through settlement houses, community centers, or neighborhood organizations, the new urban residential space became a locus of intense grassroots politi­ cal activism. “We can never reform American politics from above,. . . by charters and schemes of government,” Follett warned: Political progress must be by local communities. Our municipal life will be just as strong as the strength of its parts.

The Theory of Social and Economic Organization . N ew York: Free Press, 1964. W hyte, W illiam Foote, a n d K athleen K ing W hyte. Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex. Ith aca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1991. W illiam s, M ichael. Neighborhood Organization: Seeds of a New Urban Life. W estport, C onn.: G reen w o o d Press, 1985. W illiam s, R ay m o n d . “ Base an d S u p erstru ctu re in M a rx ist C ritical T heory.” In Problems in Materialism and Culture, 3 1 -4 9 . L ondon: V erso, 1980. W illiam son, Oliver. Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implica­ tions.


pages: 467 words: 116,902

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Michael Tonry (University of Chicago Press, 1992). 72 Beckett, Making Crime Pay, 53, citing Executive Office of the President, Budget of the U.S. Government (1990). 73 Ibid., citing U.S. Office of the National Drug Control Policy, National Drug Control Strategy (1992). 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 56. 76 See William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1997). 77 Ibid., 31 (citing John Kasarda, “Urban Industrial Transition and the Underclass,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 501, no. 1 (1990): 26-47. 78 Ibid., 30 (citing data from the Chicago Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey conducted in 1987 and 1988). 79 Ibid., 39. 80 Ibid., 27. 81 Robert Stutman, Dead on Delivery: Inside the Drug Wars, Straight from the Street (New York: Warner Books, 1992), 142. 82 See Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine, “The Crack Attack: America’s Latest Drug Scare, 1986-1992,” in Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1995). 83 Ibid., 154. 84 Ibid., 170-71. 85 Doris Marie Provine, Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 111, citing Congressional Record 132 (Sept. 24, 1986): S 13741. 86 Provine, Unequal Under Law, 117. 87 Mark Peffley, Jon Hurwitz, and Paul Sniderman, “Racial Stereotypes and Whites’ Political Views of Blacks in the Context of Welfare and Crime,” American Journal of Political Science 41, no. 1 (1997): 30-60; Martin Gilens, “Racial Attitudes and Opposition to Welfare,” Journal of Politics 57, no. 4 (1995): 994-1014; Kathlyn Taylor Gaubatz, Crime in the Public Mind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); and John Hurwitz and Mark Peffley, “Public Perceptions of Race and Crime: The Role of Racial Stereotypes,” American Journal of Political Science 41, no. 2 (1997): 375-401. 88 See Frank Furstenberg, “Public Reaction to Crime in the Streets,” American Scholar 40 (1971): 601-10; Arthur Stinchcombe, et al., Crime and Punishment in America: Changing Attitudes in America (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980); Michael Corbett, “Public Support for Law and Order: Interrelationships with System Affirmation and Attitudes Toward Minorities,” Criminology 19 (1981): 337. 89 Stephen Earl Bennett and Alfred J.

., 151 65 Ibid. 66 See Musto, American Disease, 4, 7, 43-44, 219-20; and Doris Marie Provine, Unequal Under Law, 37-90 67 Eric Schlosser, “Reefer Madness,” Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1994, 49. 68 Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 149. 69 The most compelling version of this argument has been made by Randall Kennedy in Race, Crime and the Law (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). 70 Tracy Meares, “Charting Race and Class Differences in Attitudes Toward Drug Legalization and Law Enforcement: Lessons for Federal Criminal Law,” 1 Buffalo Criminal Law Review 1 (1997): 137; Stephen Bennett and Alfred Tuchfarber, “The Social Structural Sources of Cleavage on Law and Order Policies,” American Journal of Political Science 19 (1975): 419-38; and Sandra Browning and Ligun Cao, “The Impact of Race on Criminal Justice Ideology,” Justice Quarterly 9 (Dec. 1992): 685-99. 71 Meares, “Charting Race and Class Differences,” 157. 72 Glenn Loury, “Listen to the Black Community,” Public Interest, Sept. 22, 1994, 35. 73 Meares, “Charting Race and Class Differences,” 160-61. 74 See William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 22, citing Delbert Elliott study. 75 Glenn C. Loury, Race, Incarceration and American Values (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 81, commentary by Tommie Shelby. 76 See Troy Duster, “Pattern, Purpose, and Race in the Drug War: The Crisis of Credibility in Criminal Justice,” in Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice , ed.


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

Neighborhoods that were once “marvels of close-grained intricacy and compact mutual support” are “casually disemboweled.” The rise of the automobile is closely connected to the transformation of American cities in ways that Jacobs and many others (including myself) regret; this complaint is prominent in the “new urbanism.” But on Jacobs’s account, this connection isn’t entirely a causal one; “we blame automobiles for too much.” She finds a prior cause of the degradation of American cities in urban planning, the kind that seeks to optimize the city according to a plan hatched from on high, without a street-level understanding of what makes a place thrive.

Tabor, 187 Muir, John, 94 multi-agent intersection control scheme, 245–246 Musk, Elon, 87 mutual predictions, 121, 258–259 Nader, Ralph, 108 narcissism, 171–172 National Economic Council, 4 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 86–87, 98, 228 National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis), 138–139 National Transportation Safety Board, 122–123 navigation systems, 98–100 neighborhoods disturbed by automobiles, 35–36 social life of, 69–70 zoning laws, 71 Nest thermostat, 305 Netherlands, 249 New Deal, 38 New Nationalism, 38, 138 new urbanism, 35–36 Niantic Labs, 308 Nicholson, Jack, 25 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 169, 196–197 Noë, Alva, 61 Norman, Don, 98 Norton, Peter D., 20 NSU Motorenwerke, 139–140 nuisance alerts, 101 Nürburgring, 115 Oakeshott, Michael, 73, 82 Obama, Barack, 4 Obama administration, 95 O’Connor, M. R., 13 Oedipal dynamic, 197 off-road riding, 2–3, 205.


The City on the Thames by Simon Jenkins

Ascot racecourse, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, British Empire, clean water, computerized trading, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, estate planning, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, light touch regulation, Louis Blériot, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, railway mania, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

London’s first large blocks of flats, built in 1880 by Norman Shaw, towered over both the Royal Albert Hall and his own Lowther Lodge next door. Similar cliffs rose Haussmann-like along Victoria Street, Buckingham Palace Road, Knightsbridge, Marylebone Road, Maida Vale and St John’s Wood. Tenants of this new urbanism were desperate not to be seen as second best. One critic stressed that living in flats per se ‘does not stamp them as failures’, while ‘no one who looks at them from outside should be able to guess that the rents are low’. By now London’s main streets were losing the visual coherence recorded by Tallis in the 1830s.

A result was that the borough was failing to house as many people as it was evicting. Its gigantic GLC Trowbridge estate, built in 1966, leaked and became a slum almost from the start. Its towers were dynamited twenty years later. To the planning historian Lionel Esher, by the mid-sixties London’s official architects were no longer attracted to ‘new urban patterns to dramatize a revulsion, a revolution, against the old or to symbolize a victory of the powers of light over the powers of darkness’. The LCC’s chief architect from 1953 to 1956, Leslie Martin, escaped to Cambridge, where his students concluded that the best housing would be to lay ‘four tower blocks on their sides round a rectangle of open space’.


pages: 143 words: 43,096

Tel Aviv 2015: The Retro Travel Guide by Claudia Stein

illegal immigration, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, machine readable, New Urbanism, Suez canal 1869, urban planning

The old train station, “HaTachana,” was renovated a couple of years ago and is a nice and lively place with coffee shops, restaurants and boutiques today. The train station was located in the former urban Arabic quarter of Manshiye that was demolished in the 1960s. In 1870s the first sections of the old city wall were torn down to prepare for future expansion. A new urban district developed in the north of Jaffa, right next to the beach: Manshiye. The Charles Clore Park stands on the former western part of this quarter. The Jewish citizens of Jaffa moved further north and founded Neve Tzedek, Hebrew for “Oasis of Justice,” (1887) and Neve Shalom, Hebrew for “Oasis of Peace” (1890.)


pages: 165 words: 45,397

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

Inspired by these groups we imagined a group of people take their fate into their own hands and begin building devices that function as external digestive systems. They use synthetic biology to create microbial stomach bacteria and mechanical devices to maximize the nutritional value of the urban environment, making up for any shortcomings in the increasingly limited diet available commercially. These people are the new urban foragers. When developing the objects we explored a range of points of access into the scenario for different people: from a near-future fermenting container worn around the neck to a more extreme prosthetic device that suggested possible transhumanist values. We avoided hyper-realism in the design of the objects and the photography.


pages: 578 words: 141,373

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain by John Grindrod

Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, garden city movement, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Martin Parr, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Right to Buy, side project, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

Two women of a certain age were leaning on the balustrade of a ground floor flat, having a classic over-the-garden-fence gossip. At this end of the estate, people had gone to great lengths to personalise their flats, with shiny new paint, satellite dishes and creepers growing up trellises. It was hard to see how this could be done in the gaudy new Urban Splash zone. As the evening sun hit the façade, the whole of Park Hill, refurbished, derelict or inhabited, turned a warm gold. The colours on the renovated section glowed like a bank of LCD screens, and from the city centre the estate blazed bright on the hilltop, rising above the city like a man-made Vesuvius.

‘To our amazement we were on the shortlist with Stockholm and Tapiola,’ said Ken, his delight still plain to see for all his efforts to conceal it, ‘and we then won!’ The award was announced in Washington on 10 May 1967, the Financial Times reporting that the jury chose it as ‘the western world’s highest achievement in new urban design for modern human needs’. A month later at the award ceremony in Scotland, Richard Reynolds, whose metals business sponsored the prize, claimed that ‘Cumbernauld has set the standard for the world … some of the most expensive buildings in the history of architecture have been the ugliest. In Cumbernauld you have, to your credit, combined outstanding design with reasonable cost.’21 It was the biggest international prize given to any of the new towns.


pages: 441 words: 135,176

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, megastructure, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, Victor Gruen

A pen-and-ink self-portrait in beard and glasses survives from his prison days. He was recaptured in September 1944, and died in Mauthausen in the last days of the war, a casualty of totalitarianism whose death was a lesson in the nature of courage to all of us, not least Albert Speer. Leon Krier, the architect best known for his role in planning Seaside, the outpost of New Urbanism on the Florida panhandle, and the Prince of Wales’s village of Poundbury, has been the most active voice in attempting to rehabilitate Speer. Why, he wondered, was it considered necessary to destroy the inoffensive street lights that Hitler’s architect had designed for Berlin? Why, Krier asked, did Speer end up as Spandau’s penultimate prisoner?

Not surprisingly, such a charged arena has also been used by those who have challenged the repression with which the Communists have maintained their hold on power. It has become the most contested of spaces, a representation of the authority of Mao and his successors, but also a reminder of the tragic massacre of 1989 and the events leading up to it. And it is now being supplanted as the new urban iconography of Beijing is manufactured with astonishing speed. Before the Boxer Rebellion, the area in front of Tiananmen was the administrative centre of the imperial city. The emperor’s more distant kin lived in this buffer zone between the palace and the merchant city beyond, fringed by shops and narrow lanes, muddy underfoot, dotted with little groves of trees, and still enclosed by walls.


The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Only around 6 per cent of the total land area acquired by Scottish community bodies has come from the public sector.4 The extension of the community right of first refusal to urban areas under the terms of the 2015 Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act generated considerable optimism, but the initial signs are not encouraging. When NHS Lothian recently sold the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh in what ‘was considered by many as an “acid test” for the new urban right-to-buy laws’, the outcome was predictably familiar. The site was sold to a property developer, Downing; the bid by the community group that was attempting to buy the land under the new legislation was not even considered.5 In short, public land disposal in Scotland, as elsewhere in Britain, has typically taken the form of land privatization.

Fallowfield, ‘Cumbrian Commons Face Biggest Threat Since Enclosure Movement’, 8 May 2017, at cumbriacrack.com. 1 D. Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2 Ibid., p.158. 3 See, for example, M. Levien, ‘The Politics of Dispossession: Theorizing India’s “Land Wars”’, Politics & Society 41 (2013), pp. 351–94. 4 S. Hodkinson, ‘The New Urban Enclosures’, City 16 (2012), pp. 500–18, at p. 504. 5 A. Sevilla-Buitrago, ‘Capitalist Formations of Enclosure: Space and the Extinction of the Commons’, Antipode 47 (2015), pp. 999–1,020, at pp. 1,000–1. 1 N. Blomley, ‘Enclosure, Common Right and the Property of the Poor’, Social & Legal Studies 17 (2008), pp. 311–31, at p. 316. 1 See, for example, B.


pages: 909 words: 130,170

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

As a result, there are now nearly as many Namibians living in cities as there were people in the whole country in 1991. And with a government insufficiently solvent to take on a mass housing programme and unemployment rates hovering around 46 per cent among young adults, most of these new arrivals have to make do in informal settlements like Havana. In 2007, Thadeus was one of an estimated 75 million new urban dwellers across the globe, many of whom, like him, left their countryside homes to make their fortunes in cities and towns. Each of them played a small role in pushing our species across an important historical threshold. By the beginning of 2008, more people lived in cities than in the countryside for the first time in our species’ history.

The son of a farmer, his entry into economics came by way of his early ambitions to run the biggest and best shorthorn cattle ranch in his home province of Ontario. To that end he acquired two degrees in agricultural economics. Along the way he also developed forthright views about the fundamental relationship between primary production, like agriculture, and the rest of the economy. In 2007, Thadeus was one of an estimated 75 million new urban dwellers across the globe, many of whom, like him, left their countryside homes to make their fortunes in cities and towns. Each of them played a small role in pushing our species across an important historical threshold. By the beginning of 2008, more people lived in cities than in the countryside for the first time in our species’ history.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–2. 3. “You Are Only Poor if You Have No One to Turn to” 1. “Unemployed Father of 8 in Condemned House Faces Eviction for Unpaid Rent,” PC, September 20, 1958. 2. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1996). But see also Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Ida Susser, Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). See Susan Gore, “The Effect of Social Support in Moderating the Health Consequences of Unemployment,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 19, no. 2 (June 1978), 158. 3.

Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010); Lane Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of the New Economic Divide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). For the classic study of industrial job loss, see William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996). 3. Thomas K. Glennan Jr. et al., Education, Employment, and the Economy: An Examination of Work-Related Education in Greater Pittsburgh (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1989). 4. Dennis C. Dickerson, Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1980); John H.


pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

They are built to flip: human settlements organized around the premise of the Greater Fool Theory. * * * They weren’t called McMansions at first, of course; that epithet came later. The man who bears the most responsibility for popularizing the term seems to have been Duany, the well-known architect and proponent of “New Urbanism.” A Florida newspaper quoted Duany using the term in 1990, and he could be found using it himself in an article he co-wrote for the Wilson Quarterly in 1992. His critique of the McManse—“the fast-food version of the American dream,” it segregated people by income and it forced us to drive if we wanted to go anywhere—was part of a lecture he gave criticizing botched planning in the suburbs.


pages: 409 words: 145,128

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter D. Norton

clean water, Frederick Winslow Taylor, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, General Motors Futurama, invisible hand, jitney, new economy, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, scientific management, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal

In the new model, some users of once unquestioned legitimacy (notably pedestrians) were restricted. Traffic engineers no longer burdened motorists with the responsibility for congestion; their goal now was to ease the flow of motor vehicles, either by restricting other users or by rebuilding city thoroughfares for cars. New urban roads were treated as consumer commodities bought and paid for by their users and to be supplied as demanded. On this basis, over the following four decades, the city was transformed to accommodate automobiles. Overview The book is divided into three parts, named for the perspectives or technological frames of leading social groups.

These routes were almost exclusively rural in 1920, but as the new highway funds poured in, counties and states began to extend them into and through cities. Beginning in the late 1920s and at an accelerating pace thereafter, counties and states turned to highway engineers to solve city traffic problems. Highway engineers brought highways into the cities, reducing the role of city traffic control engineers in the congestion problem. The new urban thoroughfares were largely bought and paid for by motorists with gasoline tax money. State and local governments were quick to recognize revenue possibilities in the growing number of motorists. License and registration fees were universal by 1913.111 Motorists and their auto clubs resisted. Through the early 1920s, most auto interests fought for low fees, for the use of general revenues supplemented by federal aid in state highway projects, and for the use of bond issues and special assessments of property holders to pay for city streets and county roads.


pages: 286 words: 94,017

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

This single stark statistic means a doubling of the earth's urban population within eleven years. One way to grasp the meaning of change on so phenomenal a scale is to imagine what would happen if all existing cities, instead of expanding, retained their present size. If this were so, in order to accommodate the new urban millions we would have to build a duplicate city for each of the hundreds that already dot the globe. A new Tokyo, a new Hamburg, a new Rome and Rangoon—and all within eleven years. (This explains why French urban planners are sketching subterranean cities—stores, museums, warehouses and factories to be built under the earth, and why a Japanese architect has blueprinted a city to be built on stilts out over the ocean.)

Because societies in the past had been spatially and locally structured, and because urban societies used to be exclusively city-based, we seem still to assume that territoriality is a necessary attribute of social systems." This, he argues, leads us to wholly misunderstand such urban problems as drug addiction, race riots, mental illness, poverty, etc. See his provocative essay, "The Post-City Age" in Daedalus, Fall, 1968, pp. 1091-1110. 93 Average residence duration is taken from "New Urban Structures" by David Lewis in [131], p. 313. CHAPTER SIX 96 References to Weber, Simmel and Wirth are from [239], pp. 70-71. 98 Cox on limited involvements: [217], pp. 41-46. 102 On the number of people who preceded us, see "How Many People Have Lived on Earth?" by Nathan Keyfitz in Demography, 1966, vol 3, #2, p. 581. 104 Integrator concept and Gutman quote from "Population Mobility in the American Middle Class" by Robert Gutman in [241], pp. 175-182. 106 Crestwood Heights material is from [236], p. 365. 107 Barth quote from [216], pp. 13-14. 109 Fortune survey in [84], pp. 136-155. 110 I am indebted to Marvin Adelson, formerly Principal Scientist, System Development Corp., for the idea of occupational trajectories. 110 The quote from Rice is from "An Examination of the Boundaries of Part-Institutions" by A.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

From its humble origins as an ancient fishing village and entrepôt for trading tortoise shells, spices, and frankincense, Jeddah was anointed the gateway to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the seventh century. Over time, this mellow seaside oasis has become a bustling city of over five million residents and the hub for an archipelago of new urban developments stretching hundreds of kilometers. The city’s modern and moderate commercial class, like the maritime city itself, is intrinsically open to the world. The business of religion is also providing a major boost to the Jeddah region. Driving east, I witnessed a construction bonanza aimed at creating jobs, diversifying the economy, and managing the twelve million and growing annual visitors to Mecca and Medina each year, one-quarter of whom come for hajj.

Warm thanks to Avner de-Shalit and participants in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem workshop on the “spirit of cities”: Jeremy Adelman, Gilles Campagnolo, Kateri Carmola, and Susan Clarke. From Tianjin Eco-city to Guangzhou Knowledge City, thank you to the many dozens of officials who have hosted me at “smart cities” and special economic zones in China. I am similarly grateful to the managers of many other new urban developments on all continents for sharing their ambitious plans with me. Your projects are not yet on the map but surely will be thanks to your tireless efforts. Thanks also to Tony Reynard and Lincoln Ng of the Singapore Freeport for an insightful tour and conversation. At the Barcelona Smart City Expo 2014, I’d like to thank Ugo Valenti, Álvaro Nicolás, and Folc Lecha Mora.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The proportion of the population who lived in places with eight thousand inhabitants or more increased over the same period from 16.1 percent to 43.8 percent. Great cities such as New York and Chicago were honeycombed with tenements. This produced obvious problems with human and animal waste. In the old rural America, nature had been able to take care of itself. In the new urban America, sanitation and pollution became pressing problems. The streets were crowded not just with people but also with animals: pigs scavenging in refuse piles, cows tethered in yards to provide milk, and, above all, horses carting loads, pulling carriages, and providing entertainment. Water supplies were contaminated by human and animal waste.

Skyscrapers reached ever higher: between 1930 and 1931, Manhattan acquired two of its greatest landmarks, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, and the amount of office space in the borough roughly doubled. A succession of new magazines—Time (1923), the American Mercury (1924), and the New Yorker (1925)—flattered the new urban sophisticates, helping to ignite the culture wars that rage to this day. The New Yorker boasted that it was “not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote airily about “the vast obscurity beyond the city.” H. L. Mencken used the Scopes trial to create the impression that rural America, particularly southern rural America, was populated by stump-toothed idiots (interestingly, the textbook that Scopes used was, in fact, a crude hymn to the wonders of eugenics).


pages: 261 words: 57,595

China's Future by David Shambaugh

Berlin Wall, capital controls, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, market bubble, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent-seeking, secular stagnation, short selling, South China Sea, special drawing rights, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional

China’s urbanization has been a steady process since the reform era began in 1978 (Figure 3.7). At that time only 18 percent (172 million people) lived in urban areas—today slightly more than half of the national population (54 percent or 731 million) are categorized as urban. This steady increase was the result of three processes: rural-to-urban migration; massive building of new urban infrastructure; and rezoning (physically expanding the boundaries) of cities. Figure 3.7 China’s Urbanization Growth Source: Australian Treasury Department. The three main drivers of urbanization in the future, according to Premier Li Keqiang, will be to give urban residency (hukou) to 100 million migrants who currently live in cities (an amnesty, in effect); rebuilding dilapidated parts of existing urban areas, where an additional 100 million currently live; and urbanizing an additional 100 million in the central and western regions of the country.32 This “300 million initiative” will account for the additional 16 percent due to become urban dwellers between now and 2030.


Top 10 Prague by Schwinke, Theodore.

centre right, Defenestration of Prague, G4S, Johannes Kepler, New Urbanism, retail therapy

You might have trouble with large luggage. d Seminářská 4 • Map K4 • 222 221798 • www. clementin.cz • KKK U staré paní ( Hotel A no-frills affair, but the clean, modern building is staffed with an amiable crew. Each of the 18 rooms has a minibar and satellite TV, but for better entertainment, catch the acts at the club downstairs. d Michalská 9 • Map L5 • 224 228090 • www. ustarepani.cz • No air conditioning • KKK Josef ) Hotel Modern and trendy in design, Hotel Josef fits in with Prague’s new urban chic image with its simple clean-cut interiors and spacious rooms. d Rybná 20 • Map N2 • 221 700111 • www. hoteljosef.com • KKK Note: Unless otherwise stated, all hotels accept credit cards, and have en-suite bathrooms and air conditioning Price Categories For a standard, K double room per KK night (with breakfast KKK if included), taxes KKKK and extra charges.


pages: 222 words: 60,207

Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup by Andrew Zimbalist

airline deregulation, business cycle, carbon footprint, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, longitudinal study, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, selection bias, Suez crisis 1956, urban planning, young professional

The aim being to erase the city's working class memory, by demolishing popular and cooperative centers, old social housing and factories…and the total absence of any sustainability objectives…. In no building project…were any ecological criteria or sustainability standards implemented.9 Barcelona's new urban zones were redeveloped with improved public services and, in some cases, direct access to the sea. These parts of the city became gentrified, and hand in hand with gentrification came higher prices. Higher prices meant that lower-income people had to relocate, and, more generally, plans for public housing were underfulfilled.10 One study noted the following impacts: —Strong increases in the prices of housing for rent and for sale (from 1986 to 1993 the cumulative increase was 139% for home sale prices and nearly 145% in home rentals) —A drastic decrease in the availability of public housing (from 1986 to 1992 there was a cumulative decrease of 5.9%) —A gradual decrease in the availability of private houses for rent (from 1981 to 1991 the cumulative decrease was 23.7%)11 Thus, like the experience with mega-events elsewhere, hosting the games in Barcelona was accompanied by a redistribution of living standards to the detriment of lower-income groups.12 Finally, it is noteworthy that Barcelona made a major investment to host the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures.


pages: 531 words: 161,785

Alcohol: A History by Rod Phillips

clean water, conceptual framework, European colonialism, financial independence, GPS: selective availability, invention of the printing press, Kickstarter, large denomination, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, New Urbanism, profit motive, restrictive zoning, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

It was not that workers were perceived as drunken and debauched—the sort of allegations made in England—but that their drinking made them “lazy, unreliable, disruptive and dissatisfied,” as one temperance leader put it.25 By 1885, two-thirds of factories in one survey had banned the use of spirits on their premises, but half of them reported problems of resistance by workers who smuggled alcohol in.26 The nineteenth-century social lens was firmly focused on the new urban working class, the unprecedented, growing, and often threatening social class of the industrial economy everywhere. Alcohol was consumed in small towns, villages, and isolated farms, too, but it was far less visible. Drinking establishments in small communities and the country were thought of as places where agricultural workers socialized.

Its administrators intervened in the making of the movie Casablanca (1942) to delete any suggestion that the two main characters, Rick and Ilsa, had had a sexual relationship, yet there was no objection to the fact that the movie was not only set in a bar (referred to in the movie as a “gin-joint”) that had many of the trappings of a saloon but was replete with scenes of alcohol and drinking and references to gambling and other saloonlike activities. The new urban drinking cultures that had developed in the privacy of homes and speakeasies in much of urban America during prohibition came to the surface after repeal. Cocktails, made popular as a way of concealing the poor quality of much prohibition-era liquor, maintained their popularity afterward—particularly among women, for whom undiluted spirits were widely thought to be unsuitably strong.


pages: 510 words: 163,449

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman

British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, creative destruction, do-ocracy, Edward Jenner, financial independence, gentleman farmer, global village, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, Republic of Letters, Robert Mercer, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

Its institutional emblem was Glasgow’s Chamber of Commerce, the first in Britain, formed on New Year’s Day, 1783, with a hefty round of rum toasts. Its more obvious and visible emblem was Barrie’s George Square, laid out in his Meadowflats development between Queen and Frederick Streets. Unfortunately, by the time building actually began at Meadowflats in 1787, Glasgow had been upstaged by another, even more successful design for the new urban lifestyle: Edinburgh’s New Town. II “Look at those fields,” George Drummond said to a young friend who was standing beside him at a window looking north of Edinburgh Castle. It was 1763. Drummond, the belated hero of the city’s failed resistance against the Jacobites, was approaching the end of his fourth consecutive, and last, term as Lord Provost.

But its most immediate effect was to reinforce the insights of Robert Adam that the key to all ancient design was the projection not of weight and power, but of elegance and sophistication. Refinement, one might even say. So here were the elements for constructing a setting for the social morality of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, not to mention the new urban Scotland. This fit nicely with the other great, but more unexpected, source of inspiration for the Adam style: the writings of Lord Kames. Kames’s theory of art, summarized in his Elements of Criticism, was that beauty truly is (as the cliché has it) in the eye of the beholder. Human beings have an innate sense of beauty, which objects—paintings, houses, landscapes, a bar of music or a couplet of poetry—trigger in our consciousness.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

These days thousands of couples get married every year at Disney theme parks—women imagining their weddings as the final scenes of Cinderella or themselves as Ariel or Belle or Jasmine in character-specific gowns purchased through Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings division, attended by strangers in royal-servant getups. To produce our documentary, we also went to Walt Disney World—and to Celebration, Florida, where I’d been before. Celebration is the real town that Disney built at the south end of Disney World in the 1990s. It’s an example of New Urbanism, the movement among architects and planners, beginning in the 1980s, that considers the development of cities and suburbs since World War II disastrously misguided. America abandoned the accumulated wisdom of centuries and built streets too wide, houses too far apart, driveways and garages too dominant, and homes too far from jobs and shopping, with too much dependence on driving and too much incoherent sprawl.

America abandoned the accumulated wisdom of centuries and built streets too wide, houses too far apart, driveways and garages too dominant, and homes too far from jobs and shopping, with too much dependence on driving and too much incoherent sprawl. The houses Americans built are architecturally inferior not because they ape old styles but because they’re inauthentically nostalgic. Most New Urbanists want new houses and neighborhoods to be more accurate simulations of houses and neighborhoods from the past. New Urbanism was upscale Disneyfication before the people running Disney called themselves New Urbanists. Celebration is a self-conscious reproduction of some fictional but ideal American town circa 1945, population 7,500, coherent, stylistically consistent, walkable, bikable, and charming. It isn’t gated, and it’s not just a bunch of McMansions plopped around a golf course.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

Both seemed unbounded in their imaginative visions and were willing to embrace the fantasy of organic structures as witnessed by Gaudí’s magnum opus, the extraordinary Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, or Goff’s Bavinger House in Norman, Oklahoma, inspired by the famous Fibonacci sequence of numbers manifested in nautilus shells, sunflowers, and spiral galaxies. All of these innovative examples are of individual structures, but there is no real equivalent in the design of entire cities, nor in urban development beyond variations on the garden city theme. However, in the 1980s a movement called the New Urbanism arose that was an attempt to combat some of the issues inherent in an automobile and steel and concrete–dominated society where people become alienated from one another and where commuting long distances to work becomes the norm. The movement advocated a return to diverse, mixed-use neighborhoods architecturally as well as socially and commercially, with an emphasis on community structure through designs that enhanced pedestrian use and public transportation.

See also resource limitation natural selection, 23–24, 79, 87, 143, 428 allometric scaling laws and, 26–27, 98, 103–4 death and, 84–85 life expectancy and, 194 Malthus and, 228 maximum size, 162–63 metabolic rate and, 88–90 optimization and, 115 terminal units and, 114, 151–52 Navier, Claude-Louis, 71 Navier-Stokes equation, 71–72, 75, 131–32 Nazi Party, 290, 292, 301 neo-Malthusians, 229–30, 238, 414–15, 422–23 network science, 296, 319 network theory, 27–28, 159–60, 407–8 cities and, 247, 250–51, 319–20 ontogenetic growth and, 165–66 origins of allometric scaling and, 103–5, 111–18 New Orleans, 359 New Science of Cities, The (Batty), 294–95 Newton, Isaac, 37, 38, 63, 71, 107–8, 181, 339, 428 New Towns in the United Kingdom, 263–65 New Urbanism, 259–60 New York City, 10, 251, 278, 358 economic diversity, 366–68, 367 growth curve, 377, 418–19, 419 infrastructure networks, 252 Jacobs and, 253–54, 260–62 pace of life, 327 pollution, 275 population size, 310 water system, 362–63 New York Stock Exchange, 390 New York Times, 241, 258, 300 New York University, 260, 261 Niemeyer, Oscar, 257–58, 259 “night-lights,” 212 Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, 406 Nobel Prizes, 78–79, 86, 111, 160, 177, 369–70, 383, 436, 437 nodes, 296–98, 298 nonlinear behavior and scaling, 15–19 normal (or Gaussian) distribution, 56, 313–15 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), 364–65, 370 Northridge earthquake of 1994, 46, 47 nuclear energy, 242–44 nuclear fusion, 242–43 obedience experiments, 301–2 obscenity, 20 Oklahoma City, 17–18 bombing, 47 zoo, 52–53 olive oil, 189 Olympic Games (1956), 49 On Growth and Form (Thompson), 86–88 On Man and the Development of His Faculties, or Essays on Social Physics (Quetelet), 56 ontogenesis, 164–65 ontogenetic growth, 165–73 open-ended growth, 31–32 of cities.


pages: 216 words: 69,480

Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee by Hattie Ellis

back-to-the-land, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, New Urbanism, the scientific method, urban decay

Specialist groups sprung up, most notably the Entomological Society of London, of which Charles Darwin was a lifelong member. During the summer months, working-class men would find rare species and sell them to enthusiasts. The natural history writer David Elliston has suggested this rise in interest was perhaps a symbol of the new urban middle classes’ need for nature; trapped in their new towns and cities, these fledgling city dwellers needed a memory of freedom and flight. Writers on bees tended to divide into those who were absorbed by the science and those who were commercial beekeepers, who were often down-to-earth people making a living in a rural economy.


pages: 236 words: 66,081

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

What made the craze subside wasn’t any set of laws. Gin consumption was treated as the problem to be solved, when it fact it was a reaction to the real problem—dramatic social change and the inability of older civic models to adapt. What helped the Gin Craze subside was the restructuring of society around the new urban realities created by London’s incredible social density, a restructuring that turned London into what we’d recognize as a modern city, one of the first. Many of the institutions we mean when we talk about “the industrialized world” actually arose in response to the social climate created by industrialization, rather than to industrialization itself.


pages: 231 words: 69,673

How Cycling Can Save the World by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, car-free, correlation does not imply causation, Crossrail, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, meta-analysis, New Journalism, New Urbanism, post-work, publication bias, safety bicycle, Sidewalk Labs, Stop de Kindermoord, TED Talk, the built environment, traffic fines, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, transit-oriented development, urban planning

The maverick campaigners’ role in all this is acknowledged—the main bike route through the center of Montreal is named after Claire Morissette, Silverman’s coleader in La Monde à Bicyclette, who died in 2007. Desjardins says he is proud of their achievements: “All of this was the result of a citizen’s movement, and not because of the authorities. We forced them to take decisions, year after year.” He adds: “I think we were in many ways probably twenty years ahead of our time. What you call new urbanism—it was talked about in most places in the 1990s, but we were talking about it in the 1970s. Our first congress was about changing the city. We looked much further than the bicycle. The bicycle was a tool to change the city.” — For all the romantic triumph of La Monde à Bicyclette, it should never be forgotten that the theatrics were just one part of the story.


pages: 246 words: 70,404

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free by Cody Wilson

3D printing, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, active measures, Airbnb, airport security, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, assortative mating, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Cody Wilson, digital rights, disintermediation, DIY culture, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, Google Glasses, gun show loophole, jimmy wales, lifelogging, Mason jar, means of production, Menlo Park, Minecraft, national security letter, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, printed gun, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, Streisand effect, thinkpad, WikiLeaks, working poor

She lived near the Little Rock Community Church in the old downtown historic district. Touring her neighborhood in a morning spent talking, we would pass the church and its pure-white Herod’s Temple façade. Louisiana Street’s own Holy of Holies, just around the corner from the governor’s mansion. Lauren enjoyed mixed-income neighborhoods, new urbanism, community gardening, and meeting for lunch at the Clinton Library. In short, she was a beautiful planner, the kind NATO sends to Eastern Europe. I enjoyed her nonlethal aid tremendously. We shared an intuition. Was it millennial? Some nights I’d join her house-sitting for bankers in West Little Rock.


pages: 281 words: 72,885

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik

3D printing, active measures, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, liquidity trap, New Urbanism, stem cell, trade route

This is why the table surface was colored green, to simulate grass. One of the results of the Industrial Revolution was to make billiard tables much cheaper to produce. As in our day, it was found that the game could increase the income of bars and public taverns, and it started being adopted by the new urban poor. During the nineteenth century the game got more technically sophisticated. First the cue sticks became tipped with leather and covered in chalk, to allow greater control of the ball by using spin. This technique was introduced to America by English sailors and is still referred to as putting “English” on the ball.


pages: 235 words: 68,317

The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson

anti-communist, job-hopping, New Urbanism

Sometimes there would be a breeze and Al's would usually catch it because of the fine location -- at the very top of Calle O'Leary hill, so high that if the patio had windows you could look down on the whole city. But there is a thick wall around the patio, and all you can see is the sky and a few plantain trees. As time passed, Al bought a new cash register, then he bought wood umbrella-tables for the patio; and finally moved his family out of the house on Calle O'Leary, out in the suburbs to a new urban-izacion near the airport. He hired a large negro named Sweep, who washed the dishes and carried hamburgers and eventually learned to cook. He turned his old living room into a small piano bar, and got a pianist from Miami, a thin, sad-faced man called Nelson Otto. The piano was midway between the cocktail lounge and the patio.


pages: 219 words: 67,173

Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America by Sam Roberts

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bear Stearns, City Beautiful movement, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, New Urbanism, the High Line, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, Y2K

“They are significant,” Fitch and Waite wrote, “for having served to polarize the forces of growth, thus acting to stabilize the whole center of the island rather like the electro-gyroscopes employed on large ocean liners. They have not been passive containers of urban activity; instead they have acted as generators of new urban energies, infusing the urban tissues around them with nourishment and strength. This capacity is a mysterious one in urban affairs, not much analyzed and never adequately explained.” Attempting to do just that, the authors concluded that Wilgus’s perspicacity converted the terminal complex “from an inert obstacle to urban development into a dynamic reciprocating engine for urban activity.”


pages: 263 words: 61,784

Patricia Unterman's San Francisco Food Lover's Pocket Guide by Patricia Unterman, Ed Anderson

Blue Bottle Coffee, Golden Gate Park, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, place-making, South of Market, San Francisco

Try octopus salad, grilled sardines, roasted whole fish, a plate of Portuguese cheeses with a tasting flight of port, and vibrant Portuguese wines with your meal. LA TOQUE 1340 McKinstry Street (in the Westin Verasa Hotel), Rutherford; 707-257-5157; Open nightly first seating 5:30 P.M. to 6:45 P.M., second seating 7:45 P.M. to 9:30 P.M.; Expensive; Credit cards: AE, MC, V La Toque has moved to sleek new urban quarters in Napa’s Westin Verasa Hotel. Chef Ken Frank’s voluptuous prix fixe menu brings many courses that showcase rich ingredients—artisanal cheeses, wild mushrooms, and foie gras—that go particularly well with wine. MARTINI HOUSE 1245 Spring Street (at Oak), St. Helena; 707-963-2233;www.martinihouse.com; Friday through Sunday 11:30 A.M. to 3 P.M., Sunday through Thursday 5:30 P.M.


pages: 213 words: 70,742

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

Returning was not, strictly speaking, legal, but the government tolerated the two thousand people who decided they would rather risk the consequences of returning to the only land they’d ever known than live healthy but miserable lives in the government-provided apartments in inner-city Kiev. Many of those who were resettled after the accident were isolated and shunned by their new urban neighbors, who were wary of contamination through the physical proximity of these Chernobyl people. After his return, Ivan Ivanovich worked for a few years as a guard at the power plant, and then as a road builder, before retiring to live off the land with his wife, Maria. She had died the previous year, and he now lived alone, though he had a son in Kiev who visited him often.


Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

Diamond, “Trump: I Could Shoot Somebody and Not Lose Voters” CNN Politics (2016). Published online January 24, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/​2016/​01/​23/​politics/​donald-trump-shoot-somebody-support/. 94. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 2016). 95. Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class, and What We Can Do About It (UK: Hachette, 2017). 96. R.T.T. Forman, “The Urban Region: Natural Systems in Our Place, Our Nourishment, Our Home Range, Our Future,” Landscape Ecology 23 (2008), 251–53. 97.


pages: 225 words: 70,590

Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives by Chris Bruntlett, Melissa Bruntlett

15-minute city, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, global pandemic, green new deal, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, Lyft, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, post-work, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, social distancing, streetcar suburb, the built environment, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey

With the invention and adulation of the car, it became apparent that this “tool of the future” needed the space to move and truly become the freedom machine it was purported to be. With no clear policies in place, the people at the top of city management took up the task to plan, build, and manage these new urban environments. They were almost exclusively—as you can probably guess—men. “At this point, you start to see the emergence of the planner view from 30,000 feet up,” describes Johnston-Zimmerman, “where the built environment is simply a series of blocks to move around, without fully understanding the needs of the people within that space.”


ECOVILLAGE: 1001 ways to heal the planet by Ecovillage 1001 Ways to Heal the Planet-Triarchy Press Ltd (2015)

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, do what you love, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, intentional community, land tenure, low interest rates, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, young professional

I saw young people who previously had deep self-respect become confused and demoralised. For young boys the new role model was Rambo and for the girls Barbie dolls. Unemployment, self-rejection, poverty and pollution became commonplace. Community bonds were eroded as people competed for scarce jobs in the new, urban, money economy. In 1989, the psychological and economic pressures culminated in violent conflict between Buddhists and Muslims. Healthy Sources of Energy As the negative changes escalated in Ladakh, I became even more motivated to do what I could to present alternatives to a development path that was, so clearly, socially and environmentally destructive.


One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

But it would greatly benefit America’s children and make it much easier for middle-class people to have the number of kids they say they want. As a policy reporter, I’m much more a generalist than a specialist. And I like doing stories about solutions. Like many people, when I look at something long enough I start to see patterns in it. The solution to America’s new urban housing crisis is to build more houses so more people can move to in-demand cities. The solution to the illegal immigration crisis is to let more people come legally, not tie ourselves into knots trying to stop the flow. Both America’s vast rural hinterland and many of its aging northeastern and midwestern cities need an influx of people to prevent their current priceless assets from wasting away.


pages: 877 words: 182,093

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

Mahathir bin Mohamad, The Malay Dilemma (Singapore: Asia Pacific Press, 1970), p. 25. 22. Ibid., p. 44. 23. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 226. 24. Pyong Gap Min, Ethnic Business Enterprise: Korean Small Business in Atlanta (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1988), p. 104. 25. Illsoo Kim, New Urban Immigrants: The Korean Community in New York (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 114. 26. Elissa Gootman, “City to Help Curb Harassment of Asian Students at High School,” New York Times, June 2, 2004, p. B9; Joe Williams, “New Attack at Horror HS: Top Senior Jumped at Brooklyn’s Troubled Lafayette,” New York Daily News, December 7, 2002, p. 7; Maki Becker, “Asian Students Hit in Rash of HS Attacks,” New York Daily News, December 8, 2002, p. 7; Samuel G.

., p. 7. 52. Robyn Minter Smyers, “High Noon in Public Housing: The Showdown Between Due Process Rights and Good Management Practices in the War on Drugs and Crime,” The Urban Lawyer, Summer 1998, pp. 573–574. 53. William Julius Wilson, “The Urban Underclass in Advanced Industrial Society,” The New Urban Reality, edited by Paul E. Peterson (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1985), p. 137. 54. Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), p. 150. 55. Ibid., p. 164. 56. Ibid., p. 159. 57. Ibid., pp. 68–69. 58. Joyce Lee Malcolm, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 168.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The complicated layers of state administration made it especially difficult to manage such rapid urban growth. This administrative weakness had been in full view during India’s Partition, that intense, bloody amputation of the Indian subcontinent which saw the displacement of hundreds of thousands from the northwest into India. While this mass migration led to the creation of new urban spaces that resettled these people—such as Faridabad, Kalyani and Nilokheri—the bureaucracy impeded the growth of these cities, throttling any strategy for planned growth with its “everything in triplicate” sentiment and its snail-like pace. L. C. Jain, former member of the planning commission who participated in the building of Faridabad, tells me, “We had angry refugees, trigger-happy Pathans, and chaos at the government level.

To figure out if our urban policies have changed in recent years, I meet Ramesh Ramanathan, the other half of Janagraaha’s leadership, over coffee one sunny afternoon in Bangalore. I reach late for our meeting thanks to traffic, but there could not be a more understanding audience for my apologies. Ramesh is in his forties, and his boyish smile under a head of silver hair is both incongruous and charming. I ask him about the possibilities of a new urban vision and he says, “We are making progress in the typical Indian way—two steps forward, one step back.” India’s urban transformation, as Ramesh points out, had begun with the policies of Rajiv Gandhi’s government. Rajiv represented a dynamic shift for Indian policy on a number of fronts, and one of them was his attempt to give cities in independent India a measure of power.


pages: 607 words: 185,487

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

The rigor and unity of this ideal city required that it make as few concessions as possible to the history of existing cities. "We must refuse to afford even the slightest concession to what is: to the mess we are in now," he wrote. "There is no solution to be found there." Instead, his new city would preferably rise on a cleared site as a single, integrated urban composi tion. Le Corbusier's new urban order was to be a lyrical marriage between Cartesian pure forms and the implacable requirements of the machine. In characteristically bombastic terms, he declared, "We claim, in the name of the steamship, the airplane, and the automobile, the right to health, logic, daring, harmony, perfection."10 Unlike the existing city of Paris, which to him resembled a "porcupine" and a "vision of Dante's Inferno," his city would be an "organized, serene, forceful, airy, ordered entity." 11 Geometry and Standardization It is impossible to read much of Le Corbusier or to see many of his architectural drawings without noticing his love (mania?)

And it was a state-imposed city in at least one other sense: inasmuch as it was created to be a city for civil servants, many aspects of life that might otherwise have been left to the private sphere were minutely organized, from domestic and residential matters to health services, education, child care, recreation, commercial outlets, and so forth. If Brasilia was to be Brazil's urban future, what was Brazil's urban past and present? What, precisely, was the new capital intended to negate? A large part of the answer can be inferred from Le Corbusier's second principle of the new urbanism: "the death of the street." Brasilia was designed to eliminate the street and the square as places for public life. Although the elimination of local barrio loyalties and rivalries may not have been planned, they were also a casualty of the new city. The public square and the crowded "corridor" street had been venues of civic life in urban Brazil since colonial days.


Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives by Jarrett Walker

Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, congestion charging, demand response, Donald Shoup, iterative process, jitney, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, Silicon Valley, transit-oriented development, urban planning

I’ve personally worked on several redevelopment projects for suburban centers where a huge local bus interchange was perceived as a barrier to making the area attractive. 178 | HUMAN TRANSIT These facilities are often designed on the assumption that each bus line needs its own stop location, and that buses also need space for driver breaks separate from the stops themselves. These assumptions yield facilities that are so big that they cannot be integrated into an attractive mixed-use development except by putting them entirely (and expensively) underground. One solution (not the only one) is some kind of new urban street that can serve the needs of the transit connection while also being part of an interesting urban center. In a plan for the new downtown of Surrey, British Columbia, for example, I worked with the consulting team led by Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden architects to develop an optimum urban design that was both an attractive and efficient town center and also a major busrail connection point.2 Our proposal (figure 13-8) was a new civic plaza and street grid designed to turn the required connection into an urban design asset.


pages: 294 words: 77,356

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

Political contests are more than informational; they are about values, group membership, and balancing conflicting interests. The poor and working-class residents of Skid Row and South LA want affordable housing and available services. The Downtown Central Business Improvement District wants tourist-friendly streets. The new urban pioneers want both edgy grit and a Whole Foods. The city wants to clear the streets of encampments. While Los Angeles residents have agreed to pay a little more to address the problem, many don’t want unhoused people moving next door. And they don’t want to spend the kind of money it would take to really solve the housing crisis.


pages: 325 words: 73,035

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

., 1911); Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Harper, 1975 (1st ed., 1942). Thomas McCraw has written an illuminating biography of Schumpeter, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, Belknap, 2007. 5 Bill Steigerwald, “City Views: Urban Studies Legend Jane Jacobs on Gentrification, the New Urbanism, and Her Legacy,” Reason, June 2001. 6 See the discussion of Jacobs’s ideas in David Ellerman, “Jane Jacobs on Development,” Oxford Development Studies, December 4, 2004, pp. 507-521. 7 Geoffrey West et al., “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 24, 2007, pp. 7301-7306. 8 Robert Axtell and Richard Florida, “Emergent Cities: Micro-foundations of Zipf’s Law,” March 2006.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

It must fund a hukou system in the cities for those who have come from the rural areas, while also increasing the funding for social services in general as the cities continue to grow – then somehow, ideally simultaneously, raise standards in the countryside while still encouraging movement to the built-up areas, preferably creating new cities in the interior. This is quite a challenge, and how to tackle it is not straightforward; quite apart from the vast expense, the creation of so many new urban environments, spread out around the country, is a logistical challenge. Beijing is toying with the idea of allowing regional governments more power to tax at a local level, raise revenues through land sales and spend the proceeds as it sees fit. It might work. But if it fails, Beijing will have to bail out the local government.


pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

They were beginning to notice something interesting—a potential opportunity, perhaps—taking place outside the windows of their ride-shares. They were beginning to catch on to the value of civic life. At a party, I met a man who leaned in and told me, with warm breath, that he was trying to get involved with an exciting new urbanism project. His T-shirt was creased geometrically, as if he’d had it same-day delivered and only unfolded it an hour ago: artful dishevelment in the age of on-demand. I asked if he worked for the city, or in urban planning. He’d gotten his start like the rest of us, he said, gesturing vaguely around the room, which was full of technologists.


pages: 273 words: 76,786

Explore Everything by Bradley Garrett

airport security, Burning Man, call centre, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, failed state, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Jane Jacobs, Julian Assange, late capitalism, megacity, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, place-making, shareholder value, Stephen Fry, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, white flight, WikiLeaks

From the perspective of the crane, people on the street blur into an urban flow, and the rhythm and sounds of the city, often so intrusive and abrasive, are attenuated to a subtle drone.19 When we were sitting on top of the Shard, which was at that point seventy-six stories tall, Marc said, ‘At this height the train lines going into London Bridge begin to resemble the Thames. It’s all flow.’ We understood these experiences were not isolated events: we were building completely new urban assemblages where connections, rhythms, flows, boundaries and potentiality were foregrounded. It felt increasingly like we were an integral part of London, witnesses to all its connections. Dan, sitting on the edge of the King’s Reach Tower, watching the new Crossrail construction at Blackfriars, told me, ‘I keep coming back because I feel so alive up here.


pages: 264 words: 74,785

Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class by Edward McClelland

collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, Ford Model T, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair

His rise to the chairmanship begins in 1920, when GM’s exuberant founder, Billy Durant, is fired after his final bout of overexpansion and financial adventurism nearly bankrupts the company. Under Sloan’s leadership, General Motors surpasses Ford as the world’s leading auto manufacturer. While Ford persistently produces his black Model T, the vehicle that dominated the twentieth century’s early agrarian decades, GM rolls out a variety of automobiles that appeal to the new urban middle classes: the “car for every purse” brand ladder that will come to define the company’s offerings, from the plebian Chevrolet to the aristocratic Cadillac. One of Sloan’s early contributions to GM, titled “Organization Study,” details how each of the company’s multifarious divisions can operate independently, but nonetheless in an integrated fashion, under the GM umbrella.


pages: 241 words: 75,417

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World by William Drozdiak

Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, centre right, cloud computing, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, UNCLOS, working poor

“Geography is the common point of the gilets jaunes, Brexit and Trump, and the populist wave,” Guilluy says, whose book La France péripherique (Peripheral France) is often cited as one of the rare works that foreshadowed the rise of the Yellow Vest protesters. He claims that many of these people, left behind by globalization and shunted aside by the new urban economic model, are struggling to preserve their social and cultural capital, as well as their individual identity. “What is very important with the crisis of the gilets jaunes is obviously the yellow vest itself; it says, ‘look at me, I exist,’” Guilluy observes.20 Nonetheless, apart from a shared disdain for globalization, there are significant differences among the populist movements that have disrupted Western democracies.


pages: 236 words: 77,546

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Scott Jaschik, “College Selectivity and Income,” Inside Higher Ed, August 22, 2016. 4. See Pinka Chatterji, “Illicit Drug Use and Educational Attainment,” Health Economics 15, no. 5 (2006): 489–511; Chana Joffe-Walt, “Unfit for Work: The Startling Rise of Disability in America,” Planet Money, 2013, https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/. 5. Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 112. 6. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 40. 7. Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2017), 7. 8.


pages: 650 words: 203,191

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

Thus Nagasaki was not so much a closed door as a narrow gateway and a listening post where the bakufu collected information from visiting ships (whose captains were required to write ‘news reports’ for transmission to Edo) and through which it imported books. ‘Dutch knowledge’ percolated slowly among the samurai, teachers and savants. The regime of political seclusion did not mean economic stagnation. Japanese economic growth after 1600 was driven by a remarkable double revolution. Firstly, the political system created a large new urban economy as daimyo and samurai settled in castle towns. The most spectacular case was Edo itself. The sankin kotai rules brought to Edo hundreds of daimyo and their families and vast retinues of samurai.116 By 1700 half of Edo’s 1 million people were samurai retainers living in the great clan compounds that made up nearly three-quarters of the city area.

With its large middle class, its great cities and seaports, its literature and cinema, its journalists and teachers, Egypt was the symbol of Arab modernity. Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism (formally inscribed in Egypt’s newconstitution) chimed with a phase of sharp social change in most Middle Eastern states. To the new urban workers, the growing number of students, the expanding bureaucracy, the young officer class, it offered a political creed and a cultural programme. It promised an end to the Palestinian grievance, through the collective effort of a revitalized nation. Within less than two years of his triumph at Suez, Nasser drewSyria into political union, to form the United Arab Republic.


pages: 287 words: 80,050

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

The discovery of both new and extinct species fueled the rise of a new kind of biology that studied plants and animals for their intrinsic interest quite apart from any useful function they might serve.3 With the passing of the medieval worldview, the distinction between human beings and animals came to seem less absolute, even before Darwin; after the seventeenth century keeping pets (animals viewed as companions rather than as sources of meat or as workers) became much more common. And the expansion of cities to house a growing population prompted nostalgia among the new urban dwellers for natural landscapes and fresh air. The view of nature as something that is more than just raw material for human purposes really began to gain ground with the advent of Romanticism, which not coincidentally arose as the Industrial Revolution gathered steam. The greater security that industrialization ushered in also underlay the Romantic celebration of wild and untamed landscapes—craggy mountains, bleak moorland, tempestuous seas.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Online and off, the people who create social structures need to be aware of and sensitive to human difference. This difference is crucial to realizing the democratizing potential of technology. The range of voices and perspectives exposed must be expanded; cultural diversity and cultural democracy are intertwined. In a powerful sense, programmers are the new urban planners, shaping the virtual frontier into the spaces we occupy, building the boxes into which we fit our lives, and carving out the routes we travel—which is why more of us need to learn to write code. What vision of a vibrant, thriving city informs their view? Is it a place that fosters chance encounters or somewhere that favors the predictable?


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

Wilkerson, Isabel. 2010. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House. Williams, Timothy. 2016. “Number of Women in Jail Has Grown Far Faster than That of Men, Study Says.” New York Times, August 17. Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Knopf. Wilson, William Julius. 2009. More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. New York: Norton. Wines, Michael. 2016a. “Federal Judge Bars North Dakota from Enforcing Restrictive Voter ID Law.” New York Times, August 1. Wines, Michael. 2016b. “Inside the Conservative Push for States to Amend the Constitution.”


pages: 142 words: 18,753

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Community Supported Agriculture, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, PalmPilot, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

It means setting up welcome wagons so that new people feel part of an interdependent community. It means volunteering at the youth center so teenagers will have a place to go and be minded. It can be as trivial as the penny jar near the cash register so that the next person will have a penny handy if it’s needed. Or it can be as pervasive as residential projects along the lines of the New Urbanism movement, which are designed to make sure there are eyes on the street, people watching out for each other and subtly upholding community standards of behavior and decency. In true reconciling fashion, intimate authority is a Third Way between excessive individualism on the one hand and imposed formal authority on the other.


pages: 299 words: 83,854

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy by Howard Karger

Alan Greenspan, big-box store, blue-collar work, book value, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, delayed gratification, financial deregulation, fixed income, illegal immigration, independent contractor, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microcredit, mortgage debt, negative equity, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, predatory finance, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, underbanked, working poor

Caskey, Lower Income American, Higher Cost Financial Services (Madison, WI: Filene Research Institute, 1997). 2 Industry Pages, “Check Cashing—Federally Regulated, State Regulated or Unregulated?” April 24, 2003, www.industrypages.com/clmman/publish/article_33.shtml.235 3 For a fuller discussion of poverty see William J. Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1997); Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game (New York: Vintage, 2000); Thomas Shapiro and Edward Wolff, Assets for the Poor: The Benefits of Spreading Asset Ownership (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publications, 2001); David Shipler, The Working Poor (New York: Vintage, 2005); and Matthew Lee, City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).


pages: 351 words: 94,104

White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa by Sharon Rotbard

British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, continuation of politics by other means, European colonialism, gentrification, global village, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, megastructure, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, The future is already here, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal

Both venues enabled the arrival of a new generation of young, relatively wealthy and sporty generation of immigrants.135 The separation of Tel Aviv from Jaffa, its quick transformation from a cluster of scattered Jewish neighbourhoods into one Hebrew City, was made possible only under the British Mandate government and with its encouragement: in July 1920, a few days after his appointment, Sir Herbert Louis Samuel, the first High Commissioner for Palestine and Transjordan, visited Tel Aviv and heard the inhabitants’ claim for separation. On May 11, 1921, he signed the ‘Order of Tel Aviv Township’, granting it with an independent status and providing it with a borderline which separated it from Jaffa. In 1925 the British provided the city with a new urban scheme designed by the Scottish town planner, Sir Patrick Geddes. The strategic significance of the Jewish construction during the 1930s overshadows its aesthetic qualities. Apart from the White City, which, by itself, represented not only an architectural achievement but also a crucial strategic factor for the whole region, there were other Jewish construction projects such as the ‘Settlement Offensive’ of the ‘Wall and Tower’ (Homa Umigdal) settlements throughout the whole country during the Great Arab Revolt between 1936–1939.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

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

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

Croove lets car owners rent their car (any brand) to others via an app to earn money, while Car2Go is a free-floating car rental scheme, offering only Mercedes group cars. Daimler is also partnering with Bosch, the world’s largest auto parts maker, to create driverless taxis. The alliance aims to get a fully automated vehicle ready for use in urban markets in the early 2020s.[197] The New Urban Environment “The current American way of life is founded not just on motor transportation but on the religion of the motorcar, and the sacrifices that people are prepared to make for this religion stand outside the realm of rational criticism. Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.”


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

To worry about these consequences of extreme inequality has nothing to do with being envious of the rich and everything to do with the fear that rapidly growing top incomes are a threat to the wellbeing of everyone else.85 This issue just isn’t going to go away, and I would add that it is a problem not just for the Western world but for the emerging world too, perhaps especially for China, which had historically gone a long way towards abolishing inequality, at what must be admitted was a very high price, but has now taken a long stride towards prosperity, at the cost of greatly increasing inequality. The danger facing China comes from the fractures caused by that inequality. We already see rising tensions between this new urban workforce, the new Chinese middle class, and the rural poverty it’s leaving behind. In addition there is friction between the coast and the center, between the factories and the farms, and increasing problems with corruption and maladministration. All this matters for the rest of the world, because of China’s centrality to the world economy as a producer of so much and increasingly as a consumer too, especially of luxury goods.


pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

What was the reductio ad absurdum of the tubes? The Internet was a human construction, its tendrils spreading around the world. How was all that stuff shoehorned into what was out there already? Did it seep under buildings or along “telephone” poles? Did it take over old abandoned warehouses or form new urban neighborhoods? I didn’t want a PhD in electrical engineering, but I hoped what was going on inside the black box and along the yellow wires could be ever so slightly, well, illuminated. Hankins was perpetually on the road and couldn’t stop. But he had a guy in San Jose who could tell me something about the power of light.


pages: 212 words: 80,393

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain by Lisa McKenzie

British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, delayed gratification, falling living standards, financial exclusion, full employment, income inequality, low skilled workers, meritocracy, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, unpaid internship, urban renewal, working poor

Townsend, P. (1954) ‘Measuring poverty’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol 5, no 2, June, pp 130-7. Toynbee, P. (1998) ‘The estate they’re in’, The Guardian, 15 September. Tyler, I. (2013) Revolting subjects: Social abjection and resistance in neoliberal Britain, London: Zed Books. Wacquant, L. (1994) ‘The new urban colour line: the state and fate of the ghetto in post-Fordist America’, in C. Calhoun (ed) Social theory and the politics of identity, Oxford: Blackwell, pp 232-4. Wacquant, L. (2008) Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality, Cambridge: Polity. Wacquant, L. (2009) Punishing the poor: The neo-liberal government of social insecurity, London: Duke University Press.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

These considerations mean there’s a public interest in structuring the environment in which all sharing platforms operate. That’s where cities come in. Since the sharing economy has been largely an urban phenomenon, municipal governments have been most active in attempting to foster, regulate, and shape sharing activity. For some, the sharing sector represents an opportunity to create a new urban economy that promotes values of justice and inclusion, sustainability and carbon neutrality, and democracy and participation. By intervening at a level above the individual company, this movement aims for deeper and more structural transformation.84 Cities are doing this in different ways.85 Seoul was the first to designate itself a “Sharing City,” in 2012.


pages: 300 words: 81,293

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

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

The 1961 Zoning Resolution included an incentive that would allow builders to build more volume, if they were to provide an adjacent public space. For every one square foot of so-called bonus plaza they provided, builders could build ten square feet more. For developers, the deal was too good to pass up. By 1973, some 1.1 million square feet of new urban open space had been built in New York City by the private sector, more than in all the other cities in the United States combined.20 But while the city succeeded in leveraging private development to increase open space, most of these plazas were little used. “The city was being had,” asserted William H.


pages: 354 words: 93,882

How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

In 1 653 there were, of course, more fish to go round: the population of Britain then was six million, a tenth of what it is now. It is also a fact that, at around the time of the publication of The Compleat Angler, roughly 90 per cent of the population lived in small villages or towns and worked in agriculture or crafts. But Walton could see that the rural way of life was beginning to be threatened by a new urban work ethic, promoted by the go-getting Puritans, and he saw angling as a statement against the new materialism. Defending angling against the ' serious grave men ' who ' scoff' at it, Walton writes: [Tl here be many men that are by others taken to be serious ' grave men, which we contemn and pitie; men of sowre complexions; money-getting-men, that spend all their time first in getting, and next in anxious care to keep it; men that are condemn ' d to be rich, and alwayes discontented, or busie.


pages: 389 words: 87,758

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

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

And these densely packed markets function as laboratories in which companies can experiment with different business models, technologies, products, and strategies. Capitalizing on these new growth markets is far from simple; it requires masterful city-level market intelligence, ruthless prioritization, and navigation of risks. However, business leaders need to start seeing these new urban markets as opportunities rather than risks. This is not just a matter of semantics. There’s a big difference between the way resources and talent are mobilized to take advantage of an opportunity and protecting against risk. It’s the difference between playing offense and defense. Get to Know the Newcomers In the past, many large companies have done well by focusing on developed economies combined with the megacities of emerging economies.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Pink, “The New Face of the Silicon Age,” Wired, February 2004. http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/india.html. 5 Nichole Gracely, “Being Homeless Is Better Than Working for Amazon,” The Guardian, 29 November 2014. www.theguardian.com/money/2014/nov/28/being-homeless-is-better-than-working-for-amazon. 6 John Lovering, “Creating Discourses Rather Than Jobs: The Crisis in the Cities and the Transition Fantasies of Intellectuals and Policy Makers,” in Patsy Healey (ed.), Managing Cities: The New Urban Context, John Wiley, 1995. 7 There are many different versions of this statement. The origins have been traced to a speech given by Martin Niemoller, the Lutheran pastor and victim of Nazi persecution, on 6 January 1946 to the representatives of the Confessing Church in Frankfurt. 8 Cited in Jason Tanz, “How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other,” Wired, 23 April 2014. www.wired.com/2014/04/trust-in-the-share-economy. 9 William Alden, “The Business Tycoons of Airbnb,” The New York Times Magazine, 30 November 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/magazine/the-business-tycoons-of-airbnb.html. 10 Kevin Roose, “Does Silicon Valley Have a Contract-Worker Problem?”


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

By the end of the nineteenth century, a new kind of wonderland became imaginable, one that took the cosmopolitan ethos that had been growing for the preceding two centuries and turned it into a weekend attraction. The wellsprings that fed this new form were multiple: the new interest in nature as spectacle; the runaway popularity of Great Exhibitions, like the Crystal Palace of 1851, that showcased objects of wonder from around the world; the new urban parks being designed in New York and Paris and Boston; and the roving circuses of Barnum and Bailey. Many of these environments derived from conventions that had first been developed behind the fences of royal estates and other aristocratic properties: follies, gardens—nature sculpted and arranged for the amusement of an idle stroll or a carriage ride.


pages: 300 words: 65,976

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

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

Trillin, p. 71; Pillsbury, p. 158; Gabaccia, p. 7. 21. Gabaccia, pp. 99–105 (contains Sermolino quote); Barbas. 22. Gabaccia, pp. 231. 23. Barbas. 24. Heldke. For the longer history of the term “social capital,” see Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 19–20. 25. David Bell, “Fragments for a New Urban Culinary Geography,” Journal for the Study of Food and Society 6 (2002): 10–21. 26. Samantha Kwan, “Consuming the Other: Ethnic Food, Identity Work, and the Appropriation of the Authentic Self,” paper presented at the meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 2003. 27. Sylvia Ferrero, “Comida sin Par: Consumption of Mexican Food in Los Angeles,” pp. 194–219 in Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton, eds., Food Nations (New York: Routledge, 2002; quotes are from p. 215). 28.


pages: 306 words: 94,204

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter

back-to-the-land, crack epidemic, David Attenborough, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, hobby farmer, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mason jar, McMansion, New Urbanism, Port of Oakland, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, Silicon Valley, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog

Norton, 1991. Fernald, Anya; Serena Milano; and Piero Sardo, eds. A World of Presidia: Food, Culture, and Community. Bra, Italy: Slow Food Editore, 2004. Gibbons, Euell. Stalking the Wild Asparagus: Field Guide Edition. New York: David Mackey, 1970. Hough, Michael. City Form and Natural Process: Towards a New Urban Vernacular. London: Routledge, 1984. Johnson, Marilynn. The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Lawson, Laura. City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. MacDonald, Betty.


pages: 340 words: 91,387

Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth

accounting loophole / creative accounting, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, digital divide, full employment, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, megacity, microcredit, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, pirate software, planned obsolescence, profit motive, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, yellow journalism

., System D income in, 8.1 watches, counterfeit, 5.1 water system, Lagos government monitoring of, 12.1 lack of municipal supply, 3.1–3.2 wealth gap, 9.1–9.2, 9.3, 12.1 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 11.1, 12.1 Weber, Max, 3.1 Wei, Alex, 2.1, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4 Wen, 4.1–4.2 Whimzies: or, a New Cast of Characters (Braithwaite), 8.1 Whole Foods, 8.1 wholesalers, 7.1 Wholesome Bakery, 8.1 Windows, 5.1 Winstanley, Gerrard, 9.1 women, 12.1 Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), 11.1, 12.1 World Bank, 9.1 World War II, profiteering in, 6.1 XYG (Xinyi Glass), 3.1 Zara, 7.1–7.2 see also Inditex Zeltner, Louis, 8.1 Zhang, Ethan, 2.1–2.2, 4.1–4.2, 5.1–5.2 Zigas, Caleb, 8.1, 8.2 Zulehner, Carl, 5.1 ABOUT THE AUTHOR ROBERT NEUWIRTH is the author of Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. He has worked as a business reporter and an investigative reporter, and has covered cops, courts, and political campaigns. His articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Dwell, Fortune, Forbes, The Nation, and Wired.


pages: 334 words: 93,162

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

The rhetoric of American drug use was taking on an adversarial edge, one that still exists today. Both morphine and heroin, of course, ease bodily pain and mental suffering—but the question as to whose body and mind were being eased was becoming crucial. As more people left rural areas for the exploding cities, members of the general public in these new urban environments didn’t appreciate the mental suffering they had to endure as the target of, as the psychiatrist put it, “insulting remarks” from “gangs who congregate on street corners.” In turn, addicts lined up outside of a New York City clinic were harassed and gawked at by sightseers. Inevitably, there was also a racial component to early-twentieth-century addiction: a turn-of-the-century study in Jacksonville, Florida, found that blacks, only a few decades removed from slavery, were twice as likely as whites to be snorting cocaine—a phenomenon perhaps more significant as it relates to perception than to reality.


pages: 292 words: 92,588

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

As far as I can tell, until about 2013, there were only about four people in all of Miami-Dade County who would openly admit that sea-level rise was a serious issue for the city in the near term. As recently as 2010, when the county finalized a new zoning plan called Miami 21, which was supposed to celebrate the values of New Urbanism and prepare Miami for the twenty-first century, sea-level rise wasn’t even mentioned. As one Miami-Dade County commissioner told me, “People thought that if they ignored the problem, it would go away.” But that denial is fading. Many Floridians have skipped over the anger stage and moved on to bargaining—especially over real estate.


Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics

Municipal codes, the local laws that dictate what sort of structures can be built where, could drop their requirement that each new business venture or residence be accompanied by the addition of a minimum number of new parking spaces. City planners could busy themselves with the more gratifying task of repurposing parking lots into human-friendly space. The result would be a new urban utopia. Or not. At first glance, erasing parking lots from downtown areas sounds like a guaranteed cure for the evening doldrums that characterize many urban areas. Reforming parking lot space into parks, playgrounds, and sidewalk cafés would inject charm into dreary, sprawling downtowns, and perhaps create many new jobs.


pages: 297 words: 95,518

Ten Technologies to Save the Planet: Energy Options for a Low-Carbon Future by Chris Goodall

barriers to entry, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, land tenure, load shedding, New Urbanism, oil shock, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, statistical model, undersea cable

According to one estimate, almost half of all material taken out of forests is not used to make timber or pulp and is therefore available as fuel for decentralized power stations. One project sees Nexterra’s gasification technology, praised by industry insiders for being simple and reliable, installed as the heating plant for a new urban community in the port area of Victoria, British Columbia. This innovative technology helped win the new community an award from the Clinton Climate Initiative in July 2009 as one of just sixteen Climate Positive Developments worldwide, recognizing that the Nexterra plant provides a net surplus of energy for export to the wider area.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Don Peck, “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America,” The Atlantic, March 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/how-a-new-jobless-era-will-transform-america/307919/?single_page=true. 10. Jim Clifton, The Coming Jobs War (New York: Gallup Press, 2011). 11. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage, 1997). 12. Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2013, repr.). 13. Murray argues that harmful changes in values are the most important explanatory factor. As he writes, “The deterioration of social capital in lower-class white America strips the people who live there of one of the main resources through which Americans have pursued happiness.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

Think, for example, of China's economic success – thanks to reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping – since the 1980s. Even with high levels of income inequality, rapid growth can keep Smith's melancholy at bay. Indeed, China's success has been accompanied by a persistent rise in income inequality. Fast-developing economies typically go through a period of rapidly rising inequality as the new urban ‘rich’ see their incomes fast outstripping those of the rural poor, thanks to higher levels of productivity in manufacturing than in rural endeavours. Eventually, however, this process should go into reverse: a rapid reduction in the number of people working on the land leads to an increase in productivity for the remainder, allowing their incomes to catch up with those available in the distant metropolis.


pages: 297 words: 89,176

Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization by Paul Kindstedt

agricultural Revolution, classic study, cotton gin, Kickstarter, mass immigration, New Urbanism, trade route

Initially the reclaimed lands were turned into arable fields that were planted with bread cereals, resulting in a dramatic rise in grain production between 1000 and 1300; dairying in contrast continued to be practiced on a small scale in the salt-marsh regions as it had been in the past. The new peasant farms on reclaimed lands prospered, and the population of Holland grew steadily. Grain surpluses produced on the small farms supported the growth of new urban settlements including Leiden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, the Hague, Delft, Rotterdam, and Gouda. At the same time, Holland’s strategic location on the North Sea and near the mouth of the Rhine River encouraged the development of maritime trade that brought new prosperity to the rising coastal towns and cities.


pages: 341 words: 89,986

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

With its handprint-studded forecourt and lurid oriental decor, it’s an opium den of the masses. Cinema’s theatrical drag act was popular in Germany too, albeit not with everyone. Siegfried Kracauer, a well known journalist who had trained as an architect (and was a childhood friend of Adorno’s), frequently wrote on the topic of popular entertainment, which he thought distracted the new urban classes from Germany’s febrile political situation, lulling them into a false sense of security. In a 1926 article entitled ‘Cult of Distraction’ Kracauer criticised the pretensions of cinemas to the fake unity of theatres – to the status of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Instead, he wanted cinemas to expose the cracks.


EcoVillage at Ithaca Pioneering a Sustainable Culture (2005) by Liz Walker

car-free, Community Supported Agriculture, intentional community, microcredit, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, systems thinking, the built environment, transit-oriented development, World Values Survey

We heard about Curritiba, Brazil, a model of ecological planning, and about traditional villagers in the Sarawakian rainforest of Malaysia, who are struggling to keep their identity in the face of logging, Westernized education, and the economic lures of the city. There were talks about “transit villages” on new urban rail lines (allowing residents to conveniently hop on the train to go to work, shop, or play) and urban development patterns from Perth to Vancouver. And we heard an analysis of the political and economic context of Africa — a continent still struggling to emerge from 500 years of slavery, colonialism, and exploitation.


Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

This division between urban and rural was so strong, Eagle writes, that when the 1920 census data showed for the first time how urban areas had grown larger that rural areas, the redistricting process was brought to a standstill because many rural areas feared a loss of power. It was not to their advantage to redistrict because they would surely lose congressional seats to urban areas. The standstill in redistricting meant that between 1920 and 1930, congressional districts were widely unbalanced, effectively muting this new urban population's political voice. The imbalance was eventually stabilized by the Reapportionment Act of 1929, which mandated states to redistrict in a timely manner, but questions about how to redraw district lines have remained a point of contention between urban and rural communities. For instance, in a 2017 ruling, a federal court found the redrawing of three congressional districts in Texas, including the 35th (figure 1.4), to be unconstitutional.23 These lines were drawn to help retain congressional seats held by Republicans, who are often associated with rural America. 1.4 In 2017 a panel of federal judges ruled that the 35th Congressional district in Texas violated the Constitution and Voting Acts rights because race had been a motivating factor in redistricting that occurred in 2011.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

The Chinese government started implementing its distinctive, but familiar, developmental model in the early 1990s. As in Britain centuries earlier, workers have flowed from the countryside to the cities, in part thanks to new opportunities and in part because local governments confiscated or appropriated their land as urban centers expanded dramatically. These new urban workers are systematically underpaid relative to the value of what they produce, which generates a substantial surplus that has been used to fund investments in physical capital. Investment was always prioritized above consumption. Meanwhile, like the Americans in the nineteenth century, China attracted modern technology and expertise by promising foreign businesses high profits and access to a large domestic market.


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

The things that made our cities come back to life were timeless: people, culture, diversity, novelty, and the vibrant energy that pervades them all. “This clustering of people together in cities to achieve progress is a far better force than pandemics, pestilence, or endemic disease,” said Richard Florida, urban studies academic and best-selling author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis, who lives here in Toronto. In forty years of studying cities, Florida told me, he never once encountered an instance of pandemics or other biological disasters significantly slowing their arc of growth. At its core, Florida said, what makes cities great is not the specific shops and restaurants or companies and jobs you find there.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Elsewhere in the city, on parkland freshly reclaimed from a garbage dump, a developer put on social events for a year to enlist home-buyers from the start in creating the right ambience. Consumers are expected to do their bit in building a community with a high suzhi, or high-quality lifestyle.110 Indeed, their contribution is vital if new urban spaces and the cultural vacuum left behind by work units are to be filled with the safety, sociability and decorum needed to enjoy the pleasures of privacy. Chinese consumers might not be citizens in the democratic sense, but nor are they just customers in the commercial sense. Their official elevation to ‘god’ is closer to the truth.

In Western Europe, barely emerging from the rubble of war, savings banks worked hand in glove with manufacturers in special promotions that gave families the chance to buy a sofa on credit as long as they had saved a third of the price.49 Savings campaigners built on the new culture of credit, which had rebranded consumption as investment. Buying consumer durables was investment, not spending. This rhetoric was particularly important in fast-growing countries like Finland, where peasants turned into industrial workers in little over a generation. Saving grafted a new, urban consumer culture on to a rural ethos of thrift. In a 1952 book, Prime Minister Urho Kekkonen asked whether the Finnish nation had the patience to prosper. High inflation and low rates of interest meant old-fashioned saving made little sense. Instead, Finns were urged to invest in their home and appliances.

Hugh Patrick (Berkeley, CA, 1976), 21–51; Sato, New Japanese Woman; and Penelope Francks, The Japanese Consumer: An Alternative Economic History of Modern Japan (Cambridge, 2009). For Hitoshi’s survey of the North and attitudes to modernity more generally, see Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ, 2000). 10. Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1999). 11. Prakash Tandon, Punjabi Century, 1857–1947 (London, 1961), 110–11. 12. Frank Dikötter, Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China (London, 2006), 55–6, 196–200, and 205–13 for cosmetics, below. See also: Cochran, Inventing Nanking Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900–1945. 13.


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

In short, explains Davis, the population trends have us on the pathway to, as one of his books is entitled, a Planet of Slums. These “megaslums” house literally millions of young, urban poor, where the losers of globalization and the new warriors are concentrated together in shanties and high-rises. Adding fuel to the fire are “the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor.” These range from Hindu fundamentalism in the slums of Mumbai, Islamist movements in Casablanca, Pentecostalists in San Salvador, and revolutionary populists in Caracas. These megaslums, really just “stinking mountains of shit,” are “volcanoes waiting to erupt.” Cities are the new hotspots for conflict.

It would give soldiers the ability to zoom into any neighborhood or even individual structure to see what is going on in real time. According to one report, “You have continuous coverage, around corners and through walls. You would never, for example, lose those mortar bombers who got out of their car and ran away.” By sending in robots that navigate the new urban battlefield, DARPA is hoping to completely rewrite the script of Black Hawk Down. According to DARPA’s director, Dr. Anthony J. Tether, it will give U.S. forces “unprecedented awareness that enables them to shape and control [a] conflict as it unfolds.” Some, though, doubt that it will work out the way the military hopes.


The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape by Brian Ladd

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, full employment, megaproject, New Urbanism, planned obsolescence, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, urban planning, urban renewal

They did not want to restore the Communists to power (though in this case there probably were a few more exceptions), but they sought to hold onto certain memories and experiences of life in the Communist state. A third group that wanted to wipe the square clean and start anew might present itself as free from these longings, but others have imputed to it yet another nostalgia: for the heroic architecture of the 1920s that claimed the ability to create a new urban world. The motivations on all sides deserve more careful attention, which will help us better understand what is at stake in their polemics. The palace mockup that stood during 1993 and 1994 probably marked the high point of the debate. The scaffolding extended westward from the empty Palace of the Republic; a team of Parisian art students painted Schlüter's and Eosander's facades on strips of canvas which were then mounted on the outside.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

.), 2014. 36.Ipsos MORI Generations, ‘Integration in Schools’, www.ipsos-mori-generations.com/integration 37.YouGov, ‘The Challenge Survey results’, October 2016, https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/qkp8raq0wu/TheChallenge_Results_161004_Integration_W.pdf 38.Trevor Phillips, ‘Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence’, Civitas, June 2016. 39.Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, London: Penguin, 2012. 40.Michael Lind, ‘The Open-Borders “Liberaltarianism” of the New Urban Elite’, National Review, 15 September 2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440055/open-borders-ideology-americas-urban-elite-threat-nationalism 41.www.ukpopulation2016.com 42.Peter Mandler, ‘Britain’s EU Problem is a London Problem’, Dissent, 24 June 2016. 43.Jon Kelly, ‘London-centric’, www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-248d9ac7–9784–4769–936a-8d3b435857a8 44.Tim Hames, ‘Britain’s capital punishment’, Progress, 7 November 2013. 45.Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Life, Community and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books, 2002. 46.Simon Parker, ‘Interview: Ken Livingstone’, Prospect, 29 April 2007. 47.Eric Kaufmann and Gareth Harris, ‘Changing Places: Mapping the white British response to ethnic change…’, Demos, 2014. 48.Sarah Bell and James Paskins (eds), Imagining the Future City: London 2062, London: Ubiquity Press, 2013. 49.Ian Gordon, ‘Displacement and Densification: Tracing Spatial Impacts of Migration Inflows to London’, LSE London/RUPS MSc seminar series, 17 February 2014. 50.Migration Watch UK, ‘MW286—Who is getting local authority housing in London?


pages: 293 words: 97,431

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

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

The origins of the psychogeographic enterprise take us into the fascinating but bewildering territory of mid-twentieth-century French artistic and intellectual movements. One early proponent of the idea that city spaces evoke feelings as surely as mixtures of chemicals produce drug effects was Ivan Chtcheglov. In his “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” Chtcheglov wrote that cities were inhabited by ghosts created by combinations of “shifting angles” and “receding perspectives” that “allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space.” Central to Chtcheglov’s methodology was the derive, a kind of unstructured wandering where one was led from place to place like a robot being carried along the streets by simple rules related to the appearance of space.


pages: 269 words: 104,430

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives by Catherine Lutz, Anne Lutz Fernandez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, car-free, carbon footprint, collateralized debt obligation, congestion pricing, failed state, feminist movement, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, inventory management, Lewis Mumford, market design, market fundamentalism, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Zipcar

McLay, “The Economic Impact of Obesity on Automobile Fuel Consumption,” Engineering Economist, 2006, 51 (4): 307–23. John Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra, “Promoting Safe Walking and Cycling to Improve Public Health: Lessons from the Netherlands and Germany,” American Journal of Public Health, 2004, 93 (9): 1509–16. Ann Forsyth, Reforming Suburbia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Peter Katz, The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (New York: McGraw-Hill Professional, 1994). Jeff Gearhart, Hans Posselt, Claudette Juska, and Charles Griffith, The Consumer Guide to Toxic Chemicals in Cars, A Report by the Ecology Center, March 2007. Ibid. Douglas Houston, Jun Wu, Paul Ong, and Arthur Winer, “Structural Disparities of Urban Traffic in Southern California: Implications for Vehicle-Related Air Pollution Exposure in Minority and High-Poverty Neighborhoods,” Journal of Urban Affairs, 2004, 26 (5): 565–92.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The commentary on the different views on fairness and luck in Europe and the United States draws from Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole, “Belief in a Just World and Redistributive Politics,” NBER Working Paper, March 2005; and World Values Survey, 2005-2008 wave (http://www.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSAnalizeStudy.jsp, accessed 08/09/2010). The discussion on racial diversity and support for redistributive policies draws from William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 202. Data on tipping patterns in the United States come from Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler, “Fairness as a Constraint on Profit Seeking: Entitlements in the Market,” American Economic Review, Vol. 76, September 1986, pp. 728-741; and Michael Lynn, “Tipping in Restaurants and Around the Globe: An Interdisciplinary Review,” in Morris Altman, ed., Handbook of Contemporary Behavioral Economics, Foundations and Developments (Armonk, N.Y.: M .E.


pages: 348 words: 102,438

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

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

Swifts very rarely nest in postwar buildings. The London skyline has become a desert for them. 10 Redstarts were common on bombsites after the war – another example of a bird well adapted to urban locations. It needed nesting sites – abundant in bombsites – and it needed insects to feed on. Imagine creating new urban stone walls and having an insect-rich flower meadow around and about. The point here is that, with a little forethought and planning, the urban potential for nature could be radically increased, without much cost and with lots of benefits. 11 For details of the City of London’s green walls, see www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/environment-­and-­planning/planning/design/sustainable-­design/Pages/green-­walls.aspx. 12 One study found that viewing actual plant foliage significantly increased oxyhaemoglobin concentrations in the prefrontal cortex, and that even projected images of foliage had positive effects.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

AGI helps them to predict which specific locations can most easily sustain life in a way that feels comfortable and preserves the cultures of affected people. Previously uninhabitable regions of our planet are either terraformed or transformed using adaptive building materials. Landscrapers—large, sprawling complexes just a few stories high—have created entirely new urban footprints. Inside, cableless elevators transport us omnidirectionally. It’s a new architectural trend that’s helped the world’s most important economic centers boom, which in the United States includes Denver, Minneapolis, and Nashville. For a while, it seemed as though China would retreat and retrench with just a few allies—North Korea, Russia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.


pages: 369 words: 98,776

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas

Airbus A320, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Negawatt, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, special drawing rights, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, We are as Gods

It suggests that rural depopulation should not necessarily be opposed with “sustainable development” schemes aimed at improving rural life to stop people migrating to cities. Equally, instead of encouraging low-tech traditional farming methods it may be preferable to focus on improving high-yield mechanized agriculture on the most fertile farmland to feed the new urban residents, while allowing mountainsides and other marginal lands to revert to forest. This is already happening by default in Latin America and elsewhere: In Vietnam, forest area has been increasing since the 1990s after small-scale, unproductive agriculture was made uncompetitive by more intensive, larger-scale farming in the more open market economy.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Trade had been expanding for a century or two already, and keeping track of things numerically—as well as temporally—had become much more important. If the previous era was characterized by the calendar, this new clockwork universe would be characterized by the schedule. The bells of the monastery became the bells of the new urban society. Trade, work, meals, and the market were all punctuated by the ringing of bells. In line with other highly centralizing Renaissance inventions such as currency and the corporation, bells were controlled by central authorities. This gave rise to distrust, as workers were never sure if their employers were measuring time fairly.


pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

In Werner Greve, Klaus Rothermund, and Dirk Wentura, eds., The Adaptive Self: Personal Continuity and Intentional Self-Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Hogrefe and Huber, pp. 203–22. Wilson, William J. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Knopf. “Wilson Insistent.” 1913. Washington Post, June 15, p. 4. Wolk, Carel, and Loren A. Nikolai. 1997. “Personality Types of Accounting Students and Faculty: Comparisons and Implications.” Journal of Accounting Education 15(1):1–17. Woodford, Michael. 2001. “Imperfect Common Knowledge and the Effects of Monetary Policy.”


pages: 309 words: 100,573

Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections by Patrick Smith

Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Atul Gawande, Boeing 747, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, collective bargaining, crew resource management, D. B. Cooper, high-speed rail, inflight wifi, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, legacy carrier, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, race to the bottom, Skype, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, zero-sum game

At the end of a flight, the blue fluid, along with your contributions to it, are vacuumed into a tank on the back of a truck. (The truck driver’s job is even lousier than the copilot’s, but it pays better.) The driver then wheels around to the back of the airport and furtively offloads the waste in a ditch behind a parking lot. In truth I don’t know what he does with it. Time to start a new urban legend. Before boarding, we were told our flight was weight restricted because of a malfunctioning system. Whose decision is it to take off when something important isn’t working? Airplanes can depart with inoperative components—usually nonessential equipment carried in duplicate or triplicate—only in accordance with guidelines laid out in two thick manuals called the Minimum Equipment List (MEL) and Configuration Deviation List (CDL).


pages: 346 words: 101,255

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anton Chekhov, Bob Geldof, Celtic Tiger, clean water, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pepto Bismol, Potemkin village, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Steven Pinker, urban planning

Sanitation is a central feature of the concept of the city, at least since the days of the nineteenth century when the medieval, chaotic urban environment was tamed by sanitarians and engineers, and the city came to be defined as a living environment that successfully separates humans from their waste. Historians refer to this new urban template as “the sanitarian city,” or, if they’re more engineering-minded, the hydraulic city. Even the engineers don’t call it the brick or road city, because it was sanitary infrastructure that was the mark of successful urban living. It made successful urban living possible. Slums defy this logic.


pages: 320 words: 96,006

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

When asked by The New York Times: Andrew Goldman, “Larry Summers, Un-king of Kumbaya,” The New York Times Magazine, May 12, 2011. reveals the real McDowell County: Bill Bishop, The Big Sort (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 128. Starting in the 1970s: William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996). African-American boys whose fathers: Keith Finlay and David Neumark, “Is Marriage Always Good for Children? Evidence from Families Affected by Incarceration,” Journal of Human Resources 45, no. 4 (2010): 1046–1088. the greatest gender gap in college graduation rates: Ralph Richard Banks, Is Marriage for White People?


The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

Companies have to fight harder for our attention, youth markets are becoming increasingly difficult for brands to penetrate, and so they Ethernomics | 223 are working harder than ever to jump on the next big thing. When they do, the effect is sometimes terminal. Running on Empty In 2001, viral videos started circulating widely of a new urban sport known as free running. Free running, also known as “parkour,” is the spontaneous act of street acrobatics—vaulting, climbing, and jumping on and off street furniture, buildings, and even bridges, performing death-defying stunts. Initially championed by limber youths in the suburbs of Paris, parkour is like skateboarding without the capital requirement—a skateboard.


pages: 535 words: 103,761

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation by Frank Furedi

1960s counterculture, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, behavioural economics, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, lockdown, New Urbanism, nocebo, nudge theory, nudge unit, scientific management, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, work culture

In effect, adolescence came to be represented as ‘a form of psychology and behavior exhibited by pre-adults’ that emerged in the 19th century as an outcome of the ‘peculiar social conditions’ that ‘prevailed at the time’.119 As one study explained, the ‘“discovery” of adolescence can be related to certain broad changes in American life − above all, to changes in the structure of the family as part of the new urban and industrial order’.120 According to the dominant narrative, the invention of adolescence in the 19th century was closely linked to the transformation of the family, particularly the reduction in the number of children. This decrease in family size allowed parents to make a greater emotional investment in their child than in previous times.


pages: 334 words: 103,106

Inheritance by Leo Hollis

British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, coronavirus, Fellow of the Royal Society, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, lockdown, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, place-making, side hustle, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning

But this had come to a halt in 1712 as the Tory party briefly ascended to power. Scarborough clearly then sought influence elsewhere. Work started on the square after the arrival of George I on the throne in 1714, and it was an act of astute fealty to name the square after the new royal house. Scarborough’s aspirations at Hanover Square were speculative. He had no new urban vision, instead following the template, form and process of previous schemes, picking up the same pattern as St James’s or Leicester Squares without any modification. A central square was planned and plots leased out to leading builders around the edge. A large main house was located at the north end; the other houses, sold as plots to individual builders, were large enough to attract the leading tenants.


pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Once the results were in, however, Jerry Brown called it “the strongest expression of the democratic process in a decade” and set about reforming the state’s finances. Jerry Brown’s administration had long pushed a more contained and city-centric model of growth, and a handful of his staff would later become recognized as early leaders of the environmentally friendly, mass-transit-oriented design movement that became known as new urbanism. The administration tried to ratchet that philosophy further up after Proposition 13, and Brown argued that the sprawl of his father’s California, which the state could no longer pay for, was over. “We will have to focus development in the cities and in the older suburbs, and as we do, inevitably we will have to increase the density,” Brown said in his 1979 State of the State speech.


pages: 322 words: 100,632

The Tunnel Through Time: A New Route for an Old London Journey by Gillian Tindall

clean water, congestion charging, Crossrail, index card, John Snow's cholera map, market design, megaproject, New Journalism, New Urbanism, railway mania, urban sprawl

Crosse & Blackwell were still there in the early twentieth century, but by the time Crossrail was being planned – and Soho was associated rather with restaurants, sexual services and the film industry – their presence had long been forgotten. But the Crossrail engineers, excavating a deep basement near the site of the Astoria theatre, found it full of Crosse & Blackwell pots and jars. Some of them are said to have been still tightly lidded with their preserves intact inside them, which may be something of a new urban myth, though one would like it to be true. Of all the things hidden in London earth that have briefly seen the light of day once more due to Crossrail – numerous human remains, a medieval reservoir, Roman horses’ sandals, skates made of bones, Venetian glass, part of a comic chamber pot – pots of fish paste and pickled onions that are still good to eat are surely among the strangest.


Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

Urbanization has been seen universally as synonymous with economic development and its rates and absolute city sizes have been used as proxies for estimating economic growth and levels of per capita economic product where such data are lacking. But urbanization without economic growth (or with very low economic gains for most of the new urban inhabitants) also took place in premodern history and recently it became evident in many low-income countries during the closing decades of the 20th century when very large cities (Dacca and Kinshasa being excellent examples) increasingly emerged in some of the world’s poorest areas (Jedwab and Vollrath 2014).

The only way to meet such a highly concentrated energy demand in a reliable fashion is to electrify everything. And although most of the tens of millions of rural migrants who continue to arrive every year at growing cities live in substandard temporary shelters (and often in the worst imaginable slums), accommodating the new urban residents has inevitably resulted in unprecedented rates of new housing construction. This requires a commensurate extension of engineering networks (water and electricity supply, sewage removal, transportation infrastructure) and the establishment of new factories, offices, and health and social services.


pages: 1,797 words: 390,698

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan by Lynne B. Sagalyn

affirmative action, airport security, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, estate planning, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, high net worth, high-speed rail, informal economy, intermodal, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, place-making, rent control, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, the High Line, time value of money, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, value engineering, white flight, young professional

Similarly, a foundation of trust between the public sector and private developer is essential to resolving the inevitable problems that crop up continually in the development of complex large-scale city-building projects. It is essential to success. Ambition worked against an identity of interests at Ground Zero. Though complicated and protracted, the struggles did bring forth a new urban precinct. Aspirations for revitalization of the city’s historical business center had been on the forefront of city policymaking for decades. Ironically, it took tragedy and the opportunity it begat to transform the historic fundamentals of lower Manhattan. Power at Ground Zero chronicles the role of politics and money in rebuilding the Trade Center site after 9/11 and how the alliances, compromises, and personalities of those involved shaped the achievements (and disappointments) of this most significant challenge to the city of New York and the nation.

To reconstruct the underground, the PA needed to understand what was going to be built above on the site, and Eckstut was asked to develop a transportation and infrastructure master plan that would allow the PA to connect what it was doing below with what would happen above. His agenda was to connect the two levels and make them seamless. The work was driven by the idea of creating a new urban district, a strong pedestrian public realm that related to the streets surrounding the site. A sequence of public spaces would connect transit on and adjacent to the site, the Winter Garden at Battery Park City, and a potential new commuter rail connection by way of concourses and arcades lined with retail shops.

For so many years, political language served as a stand-in for substance. Rhetorical language in particular had become a form of political action throughout the stages of planning and in the troubled interlude of controversy and conflict before construction on the site transformed the sixteen acres into a new urban place populated with daily activity. Far from inactive, the interlude could only deliver promises and more promises but now it had ended. The interlude was over. Enough was in place so the future rebuild of the whole was foreseeable, even though several pieces of the master plan were yet to come, and even though what was delivered was not the exact vision that had been promised, and even though the full urban fabric of the place was still evolving and the security issues of this twice-targeted site had yet to be tested.


pages: 350 words: 110,764

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

antiwork, basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, Meghnad Desai, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-Fordism, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do about It. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Winkiel, Laura. 1999. “The ‘Sweet Assassin’ and the Performative Politics of scum Manifesto.” In The Queer Sixties, edited by Patricia Juliana Smith, 62–85. New York: Routledge. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1996. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover.


pages: 452 words: 110,488

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

Fullinwider, ed., Civil Society, Democracy, and Civic Renewal (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999);and Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina, eds., Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution/The Russell Sage Foundation, 1999). [back] 10. This section on sprawl and new urbanism draws heavily from David Callahan and Stephen Heintz, eds., Quality of Life 2000: The New Politics of Work and Community (New York: Demos, 2002), 77–118. Relevant essays in the book include Robert Liberty, "Is the American Dream Endless Sprawl?"; Philip Langdon, "New Development, Traditional Patterns"; "Growth: New Challenges and Opportunities in a New American Landscape—An Interagency Report by the Clinton/Gore Administration"; and Ray Oldenburg, "Our Vanishing 'Third Places.'"


pages: 431 words: 106,435

How the Post Office Created America: A History by Winifred Gallagher

British Empire, California gold rush, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, clean water, collective bargaining, cotton gin, financial engineering, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, pneumatic tube, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, white flight, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

The severe depression of 1893, which caused high unemployment, violent strikes, farm foreclosures, and generally hard times, further increased the people’s concern over the consequences of industrialization and urbanization and drew supporters to the Progressive movement. This unusual affiliation of very different social, economic, and political groups recoiled alike from the prospect of becoming cogs in the Industrial Revolution’s monstrous wheel. Members of the new urban workforce employed in factories and offices; the growing professional class of businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and teachers; the isolated, underserved agrarian population; and the reform-minded Protestant churches—all looked to government to protect them from vast new forces beyond their control, especially corrupt political machines and the greedy monopolies that posed a threat to affordable utilities and public services.


pages: 385 words: 105,627

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by Simon Winchester

Berlin Wall, British Empire, David Attenborough, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Great Leap Forward, index card, invention of gunpowder, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Ted Kaczynski, trade route

The population of 38 million puts it in a league not so much with other cities as with entire respectably sized countries—it is more populous than Iraq, for instance, bigger than Malaysia, bigger than Peru. The arithmetic is relentless. Every day 800 babies are born in Chongqing and 500 people die—many of them from emphysema, since the air quality is so bad, or by their own hand, so firmly have the new urban phenomena of angst and anomie taken hold. Thirteen hundred of the rural poor stream into the city each day to try to grab for themselves some of the riches that are so clearly being generated within. Thus some 1,600 new people every day are added to the population—the equivalent of all the people of Luxembourg welding themselves onto the city every year.


pages: 267 words: 79,905

Creating Unequal Futures?: Rethinking Poverty, Inequality and Disadvantage by Ruth Fincher, Peter Saunders

barriers to entry, classic study, ending welfare as we know it, financial independence, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, open economy, pink-collar, positional goods, purchasing power parity, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Nieuwenhuysen, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 71–102 Kohl, J. 1990 Minimum Standards in Old Age Security and the Problem of Poverty in Old Age, Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper No. 50, CEPS/INSTEAD, Luxembourg Lamb, Stephen 1996 Completing School in Australia: Trends in the 1990s LSAY Report No 1, Australian Council of Educational Research, Melbourne ——1997 School Achievement and Initial Education and Labour Market Outcomes LSAY Report No 4, Australian Council of Educational Research, Melbourne Langmore J. and Quiggin, J. 1994 Work for All: Full Employment in the Nineties, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne Latham, M. 1998 Civilising Global Capital, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards Lee, P. 1994 ‘Housing and spatial deprivation: relocating the underclass and the new urban poor’ Urban Studies vol. 31, no. 7, pp. 1191–209 238 PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\MAIN p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 4995 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 238 REFERENCES Leibfried, S. 1993 ‘Towards a European welfare state’ New Perspectives on the Welfare State in Europe ed.


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

“Immigration Enclaves: An Analysis of the Labor Market Experiences of Cubans in Miami.” American Journal of Sociology 86:295–319. Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Knopf. Chapter 5 Making the Grade Education and Mobility To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students, I say, you too can be president of the United States. —George W. Bush, Yale commencement address, thirty-three years after his graduation According to the American Dream, education identifies and selects intelligent, talented, and motivated individuals and provides educational training in direct proportion to individual merit.


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

fta=y&pagewanted=all; and a press release from the Taiwan International Orchid Show 2010, http://www.tios.com.tw/tios_test/eng/5_2taiwan.php 148 Silicon Valley venture capitalists need lose little sleep: Jim Pickard, ‘Venture capital fund turned £74m into £5m’, Financial Times, 9 March 2010, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/76859892-2ae1-11df-886b-00144feabdc0.html; and Josh Lerner’s opening statement in The Economist debate on Industrial Policy: http://www.econo-mist.com/debate/overview/177/Industrial%20policy 149 The Holy Roman Emperor himself: Sebastian Mallaby, ‘The politically incorrect guide to ending poverty’, The Atlantic, July/August 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-ending-poverty/8134/1/; Wikipedia; Simon Heffer, ‘Lübeck: the town that said no to Hitler’, Daily Telegraph, 2 June 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/city-breaks/5428909/Lübeck-The-town-that-said-no-to-Hitler.html 151 Romer has pushed the charter city concept: Paul Romer, ‘For richer, for poorer’, Prospect, issue 167, 27 January 2010. 151 Before turning down the job of Chief Economist of the World Bank: David Warsh, ‘Learning by doing’, Economic Principals, 19 July 2009, http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2009.07.19/571.html 151 He argues that foreign ownership: author interview with Paul Romer, 20 September 2010. 152 It’s a free economic zone: Sean Campbell, ‘Metropolis from scratch’, Next American City, issue 8, April 2005, http://americancity.org/magazine/issue/i08/; and Greg Lindsay, ‘Cisco’s big bet on New Songdo: creating cities from scratch’, Fast Company, 1 February 2010, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/142/the-new-new-urbanism.html 5 Climate change or: Changing the rules for success 154 ‘I think we’re going to find’: Prince Charles, interview with the BBC, October 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4382264.stm 154 ‘Evolution is cleverer than you are’: obituary: Professor Leslie Orgel, The Times, 6 December 2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3006557.ece 154 A dazzling lecturer at London’s Royal Insttution: Gabrielle Walker & Sir David King, The Hot Topic (Bloomsbury, 2008), pp. 14–18; Wikipedia entry on John Tyndall, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyndall; & James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 68–71. 155 Earth’s atmosphere contains traces of other gases: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report, Table 6.1, http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?


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

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

White, Joseph, and Aaron Wildavsky. 1989.The Deficit and the Public Interest: The Search for Responsible Budgeting in the 1980s. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wiles, Peter. 1953. ”Soviet Economy Outpaces the West.” 580. Wilson, W. 1996. When Work Disappears: Knopf. Foreign Afairs (July): 566- The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Winkler, Max. 1933. Foreign Bonds: An Autopsy. Philadelphia: Roland Swain Company. Wood, Adrian. 1988. ”Global Trends in Real Exchange Rates: 1960-84.” World Bank discussion paper 35. References Readingand Further 331 World Bank. 1975. Kenya: Into the Second Decade. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Text messaging is a way to share relationships.52 In 1997, Pasi Mäenpäa and Timo Kopomaa conducted research funded by Nokia and Telecom Finland (which later became Sonera). Their report included observations that resonated with Ito’s findings in Japan: The mobile phone creates its own user-culture, which in turn produces new urban culture and new ways of life . . . Spontaneous contacts, which especially the younger interviewees make “ex tempore,” tend to be these “where are you” and “whatcha doing” calls. Such chatting hardly resembles real exchange of information or even intercourse, as much as merely sharing one’s life with others in real time.


pages: 382 words: 105,166

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations by Jacob Soll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, delayed gratification, demand response, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, High speed trading, Honoré de Balzac, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

William and Mary ruled under a parliamentary constitution that enshrined religious tolerance, protected Protestant and commercial interests, and subjected all major royal decisions to Parliament’s approval. In many cases, supporters of the new monarchy were Whigs with merchant backgrounds from the cities. In turn, the crown depended on this new urban elite to counter the landed Tories, who often held sympathy for the absolutist-leaning Stuarts. The 1689 Bill of Rights stipulated that the monarch could not tax without approval of Parliament and, ideally, that both the crown and Parliament would be financially accountable. Spurred in part by John Locke’s writings on political liberty, relative freedom of the press began to emerge as Parliament eased restrictions on publishing.


Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

Even larger than the TC-D5—some were easily more than double its size—they were affordable and very, very loud. In the late seventies they had developed an unexpected following among inner-city youth. Carried into the streets perched on a shoulder, or positioned on a corner to spark a break-dancing battle, they provided a new urban sonic backdrop designed to provoke. “Back then, the black man wasn’t being heard in society,” wrote the hip-hop historian Adisa Banjoko. “When he’s got his boom box in his hand, you’re forced to hear him.” Critics disparaged them as “ghetto blasters,” but Morita put two and two together: People wanted to take their music with them.


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

There are many excellent books that deal with one or more of these issues. See, for example, Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015); David Cay Johnston, Free Lunch (London: Penguin, 2007); Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2015); Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis (New York: Basic Books/Hachette, 2017); Chris Arnade, Dignity (New York: Sentinel, 2019); Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All (New York: Vintage, 2019); and David Dayen, Chain of Title (New York: New Press, 2016). 7. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Policy Basics: Introduction to the Federal Budget Process,” updated July 8, 2019, www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-introduction-to-the-federal-budget-process. 8.


pages: 383 words: 105,387

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

In recent years the conflict has spread across borders to the Fulani populations in other regions of the Sahel, including Burkina Faso, Niger and parts of Nigeria. Similar themes emerge in each outbreak of violence: as drought makes the land increasingly arid and unfit for grazing cattle and sheep, these nomadic people move into new urban and rural areas, where they’re seen as outsiders and their interests clash with others such as farmers, leading to violence on all sides. In this one of the major driving factors is climate change, and, just like terrorism, it has no regard for borders. We’ve seen how the changing climate has shaped the region for thousands of years, sometimes altering it dramatically.


pages: 414 words: 119,116

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Both are plausible and both may be playing a role. Either way, making access to green space a priority for urban environments should be a priority. In Britain the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment estimates that if the budget for new road building were diverted, it could provide for 1,000 new urban parks at an initial capital cost of £10 million each. Creating 1,000 new parks would save around 74,000 tons of carbon from being emitted.39 Options are available that would create a greener and more health-equitable urban environment. Active transport, usually travelling by bike or foot, but also including any form of transport that involves exercise, should be the complement to spending more on parks and less on roads.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

For migrants themselves, and for their sending and receiving societies, the impact is profound. Their journeys—whether from the country to the city (urbanization) or from home to abroad—are often heroic stories of courage in the face of great odds. The last Renaissance bore witness to a marked increase in migrant flows, and so does the New. Urbanization In the pre-Columbus world, on average, only about 10 percent of Europe (with wide country-by-country variation) lived in towns of five thousand people or more. Trading nations like Italy topped the urbanization charts (15–16 percent); countries stuck on Europe’s margins (such as Spain, Portugal, the British Isles) scored in the low single digits.42 But with the new maps, the margins became gateways and their cities caught up quickly.


pages: 341 words: 116,854

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub

Anton Chekhov, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, fear of failure, gentrification, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, plutocrats, price mechanism, rent control, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

And so whatever was lost of Times Square in the process of development did not have to be sacrificed for the good of the neighborhood. Indeed, the angriest critics of the new Times Square felt that the very act of “developing” such a place was a profanation, a blow against urbanness itself. Writing in The New Yorker in 1991, Brendan Gill described Times Square as the heart of a new urban Disneyland. In place of “a gaudy, tawdry medley of theatres, restaurants, rehearsal halls, hotels,” and so on, Gill wrote, public officials and private developers had fostered “a cold-blooded corporate simulacrum of an amusement park, designed to contain millions of square feet of offices filled with tens of thousands of office drones.”


pages: 482 words: 117,962

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

These “Great Migrations” off the land are now being mirrored in major source countries of international migrants, like China, Mexico, and Turkey. About 1.3 billion people are still employed in agriculture, and over the next half-century, 500 million farmers are expected to abandon the countryside for cities.32 New urban residents may not intend to migrate overseas when they first move to the city, but the process of urbanization brings them closer to the networks, resources, income, and education that enable international mobility. Moving to a city, or living in one, markedly increases the propensity for people to migrate abroad.


Discover Great Britain by Lonely Planet

British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, G4S, gentrification, global village, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, New Urbanism, Stephen Hawking

For tickets and listings, agencies include See (www.seetickets.com) and Ticketmaster (www.ticketmaster.co.uk) , or Gigs in Scotland (www.gigsinscotland.com) for info north of the border. New Millennium The new millennium saw no let-up in the British music scene’s continual shifting and reinventing. Jazz, soul, R&B and hip-hop beats fused into a new ‘urban’ sound epitomised by artists like Jamelia, The Streets and Dizzee Rascal. On the pop side, singer-songwriters made a comeback, with artists such as Damien Rice, Ed Harcourt, James Blunt, Katie Mellua, Duffy and the famously self-destructive Amy Winehouse, while the spirit of shoe-gazing British indie was kept alive by Keane, Foals, Editors and world-conquering Coldplay.


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

The historian David Cody writes, "After a lengthy campaign, opponents of the law finally got their way in 1846 -- a significant triumph which was indicative of the new political power of the English middle class." By 1850, the Industrial Revolution was over and across Europe, power shifted away from landowners and towards the new urban middle classes. In the early twenty-first century, the upper classes are business and political elites who accumulated their wealth and power over the last fifty years. The middle classes are all those who "got connected," soon to be most of world's population, and the lower classes are the shrinking few who cannot yet get on line.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Popular narratives of “smartness” (for instance, the smart city) are an example: in the smart landscape, there are only connected individuals, natural and willing targets of commercial messaging and sources of commercially useful data, functioning within the larger cycle of capitalized life.200 Everyone else is by definition invisible. As smartness starts to drive urban regeneration, it will become harder to hold on to the forms of knowledge lost through the capitalization of life. New urban environments will emerge, such as the proposal by Google’s Sidewalk Labs for downtown Toronto’s waterfront district, built on personalization (“really smart, people-centered urban planning”) and iron corporate control of the “intelligent signals” generated by a datafied environment.201 To have a chance of resisting this, we must hold onto earlier forms of social knowledge: voice, public accountability and the public value of social understanding, visibility rather than opacity, contextual social explanation, and above all a concern with the role of these values in challenging injustice.


pages: 412 words: 115,048

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

Far from trying to relieve the misery, Tory governments attempted, in the words of a House of Lords committee, to ward off “general plunder and division of property.”18 This included the iron-handed censorship of rebellious speech, the banning of meetings among disaffected workers, and suppression of anything that smacked of sedition. At the same time, resentment among the lower classes seethed against the Church of England, which the historian Joss Marsh describes as “politically corrupt, bloated with wealth, scandalously disorganized, and apparently indifferent to the spiritual fate of the new urban masses.”19 Church officials were chiefly focused on augmenting their wine cellars, collecting tithes, and guarding their prerogatives. Their lack of concern for the suffering of workers and the poor exacerbated the latter’s deep and growing sense of grievance and abandonment. Elbowing into the unrest came the twopenny press, despite punitive taxes aimed at doing away with low-priced publications.


pages: 416 words: 112,159

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, business cycle, clean water, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, full employment, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, global village, haute couture, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market clearing, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Pareto efficiency, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, working poor

“Socioeconommic Differences in Mortality: Interpreting the Data on Their Size and Trends,” in Class and Health: Research and Longitudinal Data, ed. R. G. Wilkinson, London: Tavistock, 1986. Williams, Heathcoate. Whale Nation, New York: Crown, 1989. Wilson, William Julius. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, New York: Knopf, 1996. Windsor, Robert, and Daniel Dumitru. “Anabolic Steroid Use by Athletes: How Serious Are the Health Hazards?” Postgraduate Medicine 84, 1988: 37-49. Wright, Robert. The Moral Animal, New York: Pantheon, 1994. Wuthnow, Robert. Poor Richard’s Principle: Rediscovering the American Dream Through the Moral Dimension of Work, Business, and Money, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.


Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States by Francis Fukuyama

Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, crony capitalism, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, land reform, land tenure, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Those who settled British America, by contrast, were political participants from the beginning with a self-interest in maintaining a democratic political order. Social cleavage lies at the root of Argentina’s weak rule of law. The military coup in 1930, which represented the first major break in Argentina’s constitutional order, occurred because the country’s landed oligarchy feared the rise of new urban middle and working classes. The undermining of the rule of law started at the top as the Supreme Court was made to retroactively endorse the legality of the coup. Suppression of popular forces then paved the way for the rise of Peronism, which, once in power, showed just as little respect for rules and laws as the oligarchs it replaced.


Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

The Cold War Global demand for a more dependable and cheaper method of refrigeration, particularly after 1850, spurred scientists to advance the usefulness of refrigerants. Great Britain led the way in driving better cold-storage capabilities to preserve meat during ocean transportation. Great Britain had a growing urban population, and the country needed to ship and store larger quantities of perishable food to meet the needs of its new urban dwellers. Another big pressure point was the US brewing industry, largely based in the South. The brewing industry needed a lot of ice, but the ice came from the North, an unsustainable transport system. The first major step toward mechanical refrigeration came in 1755. William Cullen, a Scottish physician, chemist, agriculturalist, and prominent professor at the Edinburgh Medical School, discovered a way to artificially create temperatures low enough to form ice.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

This much was clear as long ago as 2007, when Apple dropped the “Computer” from their corporate name.17 The progress of the Stacks is lubricated by the fact that, as one sector after another is decomposed and reformulated around the production, analysis and interactive provision of data, a new market territory falls squarely into their core area of expertise. Information is the substance of the new mobility, as it is of the new healthcare, the new urbanism, the new warfare and so on, and this affords the enterprise that has mastered information-work a near-infinite series of pivots. No longer a vendor of hardware, nor merely a service provider, the Stack has become an indispensable intermediary in all the relations that together constitute everyday experience.


pages: 366 words: 123,151

The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today by Ted Conover

airport security, Atahualpa, carbon footprint, Deng Xiaoping, East Village, financial independence, Google Earth, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal

Nigeria, writes Jeffrey Tayler in The Atlantic, “is lurching toward disaster.” Rapid urban growth, argues Mike Davis in Harper’s, “has been a recipe for the inevitable mass production of slums. Much of the urban world, as a result, is rushing backward to the age of Dickens.” It could also be said that many of the people in the new urban world, driven by need but also by ambition, are fashioning inventive new ways to get by. Despite the congestion and chaos in Lagos, its pollution and absence of infrastructure (most neighborhoods lack running water, central sewage, and dependable electric power), many millions of people survive there.


pages: 468 words: 123,823

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Department of Commerce, 1997, 8). 31 Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), “LIS Key Figures: Relative Poverty Rates for the Total Population, Children and the Elderly,” www.lisproject.org. 32 Howard Glennerster, “United States Poverty Studies and Poverty Measurement: The Past Twenty-Five Years,” Social Service Review (March 2002): 83–107; State of Working America 2002–03, epinet.org. 33 Katz, Undeserving Poor, 181. 34 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 323. 35 Dwight Macdonald, “Our Invisible Poor,” New Yorker, January 19, 1963, 132. 36 In Hunter, Poverty, 1. 37 In Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1776 [1994]). 38 Ibid. 39 Charles Murray, “What to Do About Welfare,” Commentary, December 1994. 40 William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1996), 160. 41 U.S. Census Bureau, “Service Annual Survey 2004,” April 2006. 42 B.A. Botkin, ed., Sidewalks of America: Folklore, Legends, Sagas, Traditions, Customs, Songs, Stories and Sayings of City Folk (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), 56. 43 Smeeding, “Public Policy, Economic Inequality, and Poverty,” 955–83. 44 Quoted in Macdonald, “Our Invisible Poor,” 86. 45 George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (San Francisco: ICS, 1981 [1993]), 78. 46 Smeeding, “Public Policy, Economic Inequality, and Poverty,” 955–83. 47 Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, The State of Working America 1996–1997 (New York: Economic Policy Institute/M.E.


pages: 550 words: 124,073

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

The old middle classes, by contrast, have been locked out of the new economy, and they increasingly find that their children are as well. They blame globalization, immigrants, and the breakdown of the traditional family, which are reminders of their own loss of status, and they see elites as politically beholden to the new urban and educated classes. This division is orthogonal to the midcentury social, economic, and political integration of the middle and lower middle classes, held together by strong complementarities in production, but it is not in our view “post-materialist” (Inglehart 1971, 1990). What we reject is thus the notion that the “new politics” of populism is a purely cultural phenomenon, as a “cultural backlash” against the rise of “postmaterialism”—a view expounded by Inglehart and Norris (2017).


pages: 1,203 words: 124,556

Lonely Planet Cape Town & the Garden Route (Travel Guide) by Lucy Corne

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, load shedding, Mark Shuttleworth, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, retail therapy, Robert Gordon, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl

In Victoria Bay you can try a beginner lesson or rent a board and join the experts on a more challenging day trip. 2The Garden Route Surfing along the Garden Route MATTHEW MICAH WRIGHT/GETTY IMAGES © Cape Town’s Top 10 Kalk Bay 10This delightful False Bay fishing village – named after the kilns that produced lime from seashells, used for painting buildings in the 17th century – offers an abundance of antique, arts and craft shops and great cafes and restaurants, as well as a daily fish market at its harbour. A drink or meal at institutions such as the Brass Bell pub or Live Bait restaurant – nearly as close to the splashing waters of False Bay as you can get without swimming – are fine ways to pass the time. 1Simon's Town & Southern Peninsula Kalk Bay THEGIFT777/GETTY IMAGES © What’s New Urban Farms & Farmers Markets The Mother City is proverbially going back to its historical roots with an emerging urban-farm movement. Leading the way is the Oranjezicht City Farm, with its associated Saturday farmers market, and the food-security activists Tyisa Nabanye, who have crafted a biodynamic market garden in Tamboerskloof, where they hold the Erf 81 Food Market on Sundays.


pages: 456 words: 123,534

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Since expansion of services—health care services, legal services, financial services—is usually a reliable sign of a country making a successful middle-income transition, current policies may actually be retarding the economy’s maturation.14 Patrick Chovanec, a business professor at Tsing Hua University in Beijing and a long-time China watcher, has become a leading voice in a growing chorus of analysts who are distinctly bearish on China’s near-term economic future. Chovanec suggests that the country’s response to the financial crash, while effective in the short term in maintaining employment, may have deepened the underlying problems. National banks vastly increased the supply of credit—by about 40 percent, Chovanec estimates—and much of it went into new urban apartment housing, vast swaths of which now stand empty.15 That may not be as bad as it sounds. Completed apartments in China typically contain few if any improvements like kitchen appliances, and there are no real estate taxes, so the cost of carrying vacant housing is lower than in most other countries.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, big-box store, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, union organizing, War on Poverty, white flight, World Values Survey

The one is individualist; the other is social." The one staged revivals; the other sought to reform the world.*10 Walter Rauschenbusch was the most well-known proponent of the Social Gospel. Rauschenbusch pastored a church in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, and from that vantage point in the new urban slum, he watched the modern industrial order rub raw against humanity. He was an optimist, believing in the "immense latent perfectibility of human nature."11 Perfection, however, required social intervention. Rauschenbusch wrote in 1908 that a "sense of equality is the basis for Christian morality."


The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World by Robert Morrison

British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, financial independence, full employment, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, railway mania, stem cell, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, wage slave

Sporting events, especially prizefighting, drew huge crowds. People gambled, often to the point of obsession, and on everything from impromptu dares between friends to horse racing, cards, and dice games. Shopping was a major source of entertainment, as consumer culture moved from bustling markets to sleek new urban spaces. Elites gathered at Almack’s to dance, dine, gossip, and charm, while crowds from across the social classes flocked to holiday resorts, pleasure gardens, and public fairs. The Regency’s delight in wit was on full display at these events, as was its love of food and alcohol, both of which were consumed in jaw-dropping quantities.


pages: 413 words: 128,093

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

affirmative action, airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global village, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

If, under the guise of free market ideology, the state merely leaps off the stage and hands the existing political economy to upper-caste brethren in narrow, private transactions, leaving the “backward classes” to find opportunity on their own, the eventual result could be disastrously inequitable. Optimists in India pin their hopes on the strength and caste pluralism of the new urbanized, consumerist middle class. Optimists in Pakistan are a little harder to find. For reasons that perhaps he alone considers noble, former Indian prime minister V. P. Singh offered an awkward quota-based form of this necessary state mediation in August 1990, when he proposed to implement the affirmative action and government jobs plan known as the Mandal Commission report.


Cyprus Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, New Urbanism, place-making, Skype

Everything from the traditional spaghetti Bolognese to the thin-crusted gourmet pizzas is perfectly presen­ted and delicious. It also has imported Italian beers (Peroni) from €3 and an excellent wine list. Nuevo MexicoMEXICAN €€€ (Leoforos Artemidos 10; www.nuevomexico.com.cy; mains €8-15) Located on the 1st floor, this new urban restaurant has flavour-filled Mexican food like quesadillas and enchiladas cooked by Mexican chefs. Bright colours, comfy chairs and friendly staff ensure great dining for families. Be ready for the musical interludes, as bar staff and waitresses love to burst into impromptu salsa shows. Zakos BeachSEAFOOD €€€ (Makenzy Beach; www.zakosbeach.com; mains €8-18; 9am-11.30pm) On Makenzy beachfront, with bright views of Larnaka town’s best beach, fresh fish meze is served on traditional long tables.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

These poor could not be counted on as political allies of the government. But they were there—like slaves, or Indians—invisible ordinarily, a menace if they rose. There were more solid citizens, however, who might give steady support to the system—better-paid workers, landowning farmers. Also, there was the new urban white-collar worker, born in the rising commerce of the time, described by Thomas Cochran and William Miller (The Age of Enterprise): Dressed in drab alpaca, hunched over a high desk, this new worker credited and debited, indexed and filed, wrote and stamped invoices, acceptances, bills of lading, receipts.

And he went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a strike of garbage workers in that city. There, standing on a balcony outside his hotel room, he was shot to death by an unseen marksman. The Poor People’s Encampment went on, and then it was broken up by police action, just as the World War I veterans’ Bonus Army of 1932 was dispersed. The killing of King brought new urban outbreaks all over the country, in which thirty-nine people were killed, thirty-five of them black. Evidence was piling up that even with all of the civil rights laws now on the books, the courts would not protect blacks against violence and injustice: In the 1967 riots in Detroit, three black teen-agers were killed in the Algiers Motel.


The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin

anti-communist, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, cognitive bias, colonial rule, Corn Laws, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, labour mobility, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, railway mania, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, Scientific racism, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

It transformed the geographical space within which people in the British Isles could imagine their lives. Secondly, while Britain had long been a ‘polite and commercial’ society, the growth of new industries alongside old trading connections, the rapid integration of the national economy (partly through railways), and the appearance of new urban societies where social bonds and identities were being remade, created a more intensely competitive and commercialised society, or perhaps more accurately one where a competitive and commercial ethos was ever more widely diffused. We should not listen too much to the lamentations of contemporaries regretting the end of deference (or migrants in exile bemoaning the rise and rise of conspicuous consumption87), but the census records give some indirect indication of how quickly commerce was expanding as an occupation.

In 1911, wool exports were worth £6.5 million; and meat, butter and cheese exports £6.3 million. 148. Simpkin, Instability, p. 175. 149. See M. King, Frank Sargeson: A Life (Auckland, 1995), ch. 7. The classic account in fiction is J. Mulgan, Man Alone (1939). 150. M. Fairburn, ‘The Rural Myth and the New Urban Frontier: An Approach to New Zealand Social History’, New Zealand Journal of History, 9, 1 (1975), 3–21. 151. Reeves, Long White Cloud, p. 407. 152. For the persistence of this outlook up to 1940, see C. Hilliard, ‘Stories of Becoming: The Centennial Surveys and the Colonization of New Zealand’, New Zealand Journal of History, 33, 1 (1999), 4. 153.


pages: 444 words: 138,781

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

affirmative action, Cass Sunstein, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, dumpster diving, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, housing justice, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jobless men, Kickstarter, late fees, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, payday loans, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, statistical model, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, working poor, young professional

“Exploitation” appears but twice in William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]), when Wilson summarizes orthodox Marxist accounts, and again twice in Wilson’s When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996), when he describes blacks’ aversion to it. In Loïc Wacquant’s Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), you can find four instances of “exploitation,” only one of which refers to the exploitation of the poor by the rich (page 123n7).


No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans by Michael S. Barr

active measures, asset allocation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, information asymmetry, it's over 9,000, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, market friction, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, p-value, payday loans, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, search costs, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked

Chicago: Center for Financial Services Innovation (http://cfsinnovation.com/system/files/imported/managed_documents/threecitysurvey. pdf ). Train, Kenneth E. 2003. Discrete Choice Methods with Simulation. Cambridge University Press. Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Alfred Knopf. 12864-04_CH04_3rdPgs.indd 114 3/23/12 11:55 AM 5 which way to the bank? michael s. barr, jane k. dokko, ron borzekowski, and elizabeth k. kiser C urrently, in the United States, geographic access to retail banking services is unequal across communities. In particular, households living in wealthier communities tend to travel shorter distances to bank branches and have more branches available in their neighborhoods from which to choose.


pages: 505 words: 137,572

Dr. Johnson's London: Coffee-Houses and Climbing Boys, Medicine, Toothpaste and Gin, Poverty and Press-Gangs, Freakshows and Female Education by Liza Picard

A. Roger Ekirch, clean water, double entry bookkeeping, housing justice, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, New Urbanism, plutocrats, South Sea Bubble

The Thames watermen’s complaint was only a revised version of a centuries-old grievance. (The Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1767). Unfortunately, this riveting story was not followed up in subsequent issues, but I can say that the water-wheels stayed until 1822, and the Thames Water Authority is still liable under the 1582 grant. Rosemary Weinstein, ‘New urban demands in early modern London’, Medical History, Supplement no. 11, 1991. 30. Phillips, op. cit. 31. Entick, op. cit. 32. Pennant, op. cit.: in describing the building of Westminster Bridge he gave the figure as 22 feet. Discrepancies in figures can happen in even the most carefully researched works. 33.


pages: 452 words: 135,790

Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From the World of Plants by Jane Goodall

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, Easter island, European colonialism, founder crops, Google Earth, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, language of flowers, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, precautionary principle, transatlantic slave trade

We are beginning to stand up against the corporate/industrial agriculture giants that control so much of how our food is grown and distributed. It is a form of activism—doing our bit, along with the small family farms and organic farmers, to create an alternative to a system that is poisoning the world. The New Urban Landscape—Food Gardens Across the globe, from Russia to Argentina, from Cuba and Haiti to Tanzania, in almost every city, people are growing food. In some cases it is for pure pleasure, the joy of being connected to the land, of picking and eating a sun-ripened tomato, cooking your own runner beans.


To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 by T M Devine

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, full employment, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Red Clydeside, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

The unemployed farm worker, who inevitably had lost his home, had no choice but to move to seek a job. Thirdly, Scottish urbanization was notable for its speed and scale. The proportion of Scots living in settlements of over 5,000 rose from 31 per cent in 1831 to almost 60 per cent in 1911. The vast majority of the new urban populations were from the farms, villages and small towns of the Lowland countryside. Fourthly, the first phase of industrialization down to c.1830 had extended manufacturing employment, especially in textiles, in rural areas. During the coal, iron and steel industrialization phase, production concentrated more intensively in the central Lowlands, the Border woollen towns, Dundee, Fife and Midlothian.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Technology and the Future. 9th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson, 2003. Thorne, K., and A. Kouzmin. “Cyberpunk-Web 1.0 ‘Egoism’ Greets Group-Web 2.0 ‘Narcissism’: Convergence, Consumption, and Surveillance in the Digital Divide.” Administrative Theory & Praxis 30, no. 3 (2008): 299-323. Thrift, N. “New Urban Eras and Old Technological Fears: Reconfiguring the Goodwill of Electronic Things.” Urban Studies 33, no. 8 (1996): 1463. Van Dijck, J., and D. Nieborg. “Wikinomics and Its Discontents: A Critical Analysis of Web 2.0 Business Manifestos.” New Media & Society 11, no. 5 (2009): 855. Verheul, Jaap, ed.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

The first challenge is demographic, as India grapples with a population bulge that will deposit at least ten million young people into its labor market every year for decades, all looking for jobs that presently do not exist.8 The second involves urbanization, as hundreds of millions more look to leave rural poverty for new urban opportunities, straining the country’s already teeming cities. A third relates to the development of manufacturing, a crucial ingredient in the recipe for economic development, but an area where India has long struggled. And all of this is without wrestling with the twin challenges Modi himself placed at the heart of his governing agenda: ending corruption and lifting up those he called “the poorest of the poor.”


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Moreover, with reduced incomes, they couldn’t buy the goods produced in the cities, like cars.10 Thus, farmers’ suffering was quickly felt in the cities, and the consequences then reverberated back: lower incomes in cities meant lower demand for agricultural goods, lower prices, and more suffering on the farms. The economy was caught in a low-level equilibrium trap, from which it emerged only as a result of World War II, where massive government intervention—the war effort—resulted in the movement of individuals from the rural area to the cities and training them for the new urban jobs: ushering in the post-World War II era of prosperity. The lesson of this experience is that if innovation is not well managed, rather than bringing prosperity to all, it could have just the opposite effect. Today, as a result of advances in economics, we know better how to manage an economy confronting innovation.


pages: 502 words: 128,126

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

As Gangaidzo explained: The colonial era really did produce a catastrophic dislocation of the lives of common people. All those wars of self-defence, bitter rebellions, millennial uprisings and a million individual acts of protest were set aside airily as the mere product of benighted savagery, perverted superstition or natural foolishness. All those new urban slums, miseries, moral squalors were explained, when they were explained at all, as the outcome of African fecklessness, incompetence or worse. And so with the post-independence upheavals, excellent institutions, it was said, had been provided – whose fault but African incapacity if they now failed to work?


pages: 447 words: 142,527

Lustrum by Robert Harris

Boris Johnson, land reform, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, plutocrats

We're your friends.' 'But no jury is going to find him guilty,' objected Cicero quietly. 'The poor fellow's clearly lost his brains.' 'Perduellio isn't heard before a jury. That's what's so cunning. It's heard before two judges, specially appointed for the purpose.' 'Appointed by whom?' 'Our new urban praetor, Lentulus Sura.' Cicero grimaced at the name. Sura was a former consul, a man of great ambition and boundless stupidity, two qualities which in politics often go together. 'And whom has Old Sleepy-Head chosen as judges? Do we know?' 'Caesar is one. And Caesar is the other.' 'What?' 'Gaius Julius Caesar and his cousin Lucius are to be selected to hear the case.'


pages: 489 words: 132,734

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, Potemkin village, profit motive, rent control, Shenzhen special economic zone , SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, starchitect, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

Jazz bands played gigs at the Taj Mahal Hotel, often on an international circuit that included nightclub-crazed Shanghai. World-renowned touring artists, like the Petrograd ballerina Anna Pavlova, performed on Bombay’s stages. The ultimate expression of the new Bombay cosmopolitanism was the cinema. In going out for a movie, Bombayites were not only participating in a new urban ritual but, through the films themselves, being exposed to places where they could not afford to travel and learning about cultures and social milieus they might never encounter in their real lives. In time, Bombay would come to produce films as heartily as it consumed them, eventually spawning the world’s largest film industry.


pages: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The greatest demonstration of this assertiveness came with the construction of the Ringstrasse, the major artery girding the historic city center.7 As industrial growth accelerated at midcentury, Vienna and its suburbs underwent profound changes. In 1850, the city incorporated its surrounding districts; however, the medieval city wall still separated the two areas. In 1857, Kaiser Franz Josef announced that the walls would be razed. In 1858, the government initiated a competition for a new urban plan. Many of Vienna’s most famous edifices were erected as part of this plan: the neo-Romantic State Opera House, the Natural History and Fine Arts Museums, the neoclassical Parliament building, the Burgtheater, the neo-Gothic City Hall, the neo-Renaissance University of Vienna. When the imperial and municipal governments bickered over finances, private investors and banking institutions took over construction.


pages: 476 words: 138,420

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, Transnistria, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game, éminence grise

It took Khrushchev a good part of the rest of the decade to rid himself of other potential rivals in the Politburo, ranging from the head of the Soviet government, Georgii Malenkov, to the minister of foreign affairs, Viacheslav Molotov, and the minister of defense and hero of the “Great Patriotic War,” Georgii Zhukov. Khrushchev’s years in power became known for a number of ambitious reforms, including decentralization of economic decision-making to the regions, attempts to revive struggling Soviet agriculture by paying salaries to peasants, and an ambitious campaign of building new urban housing. But few of his initiatives attracted more attention than his de-Stalinization campaign, which condemned Stalin’s crimes against the government and party elite (but not against the people), released most political prisoners from the Gulag—the state-run system of concentration camps—and launched public debate on economic, social, and cultural development.


pages: 445 words: 135,648

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

So, seen from a certain angle, you could almost say that Tinder was invented by a couple of misogynistic tech bros and marketed by a foot soldier for the patriarchy, all of whom the media made into stars. As Tinder caught fire, registering “a billion swipes a day” by its own account, its founders became giddy with their success. In 2014, Rad and Mateen posted on their Instagram feeds screenshots of a new Urban Dictionary term: “Tinder slut.” Mateen told Bloomberg Businessweek that when the entry appeared, “it was an exciting day for us.” In her lawsuit against Tinder and IAC for sexual harassment and discrimination, Wolfe alleged that Mateen, whom she had dated, had sent her emails calling her “a desperate loser who jumps from relationship to relationship,” “a gold digger,” a “disease,” a “club whore,” and a “slut.”


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The most prominent symptoms of economic ossification for younger generations—and of concern for the country at large—are radical disruptions in the usual middle-class patterns that encourage traditional citizenship and national cohesion: marriage, child rearing, and home ownership. All are increasingly being delayed until the late twenties—or never envisioned at all by a new urban caste. Many see child rearing and even marriage as bothersome abstractions. Social justifications for the diminishment of these traditionally more conservative institutions follow from the economic realities that make them more difficult.16 From 1950 to 2019 the average age of first marriage soared for males from about twenty-three to thirty and for females from twenty-two to twenty-nine.


pages: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

But most, at least at first, settled in the country’s burgeoning cities, in the fast-spreading districts that came to be called slums (a word that came into use, in both Britain and America, about 1825). For the first time in American history, a substantial portion of the population was poor. But most of the new urban poor were not poor for long. These slums, by modern standards, were terrible almost beyond imagination, with crime-and vermin-ridden, sunless apartments that often housed several people, sometimes several families, to a room and had only communal privies behind the buildings. In the 1900 census, when conditions in the slums had much improved from mid-century, one district in New York’s Lower East Side had a population of more than fifty thousand but only about five hundred bathtubs.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

(eds) (2007) The feminist economics of trade, London: Routledge. 25 This was suggested to me by Erik Olin Wright. 26 Royal Society (2012) People and the planet report, London: Royal Society, http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/policy/projects/people-planet/2012-04-25-PeoplePlanet.pdf. 27 Morgan, K.J. (2014) ‘The new urban foodscape’, in Bohn, K. and Viljoen, A. (eds) Second nature urban agriculture: Designing productive cities, London: Routledge. For more details see http://www.esrc.ac.uk/news-and-events/videos/celebrating-impact-prize-winners-2013.aspx?media-component=tcm:8-26076&type=video. 28 Pizzigati, S. (2012) The rich don’t always win, New York: Seven Stories Press. 29 Marquand, D. (2014) Mammon’s kingdom: An essay on Britain, now, London: Allen Lane. 30 Huffington Post (2012) ‘Rupert Murdoch pushed Tony Blair over Iraq war, claims Alastair Campbell’, 16 June, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/06/16/rupert-murdoch-pushed-tony-blair-over-iraq-war-claims-alastair-campbell_n_1602091.html. 31 Aitchison, G. (2012) ‘How capitalism is turning the internet against democracy and how to turn it back’, OpenDemocracy, http://www.opendemocracy.net/guy-aitchison/how-capitalism-is-turning-internet-against-democracy-and-how-to-turn-it-back.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

Robert Jutte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp.29, 74. 103. Tilly, "Collective Violence," p.77. 104. For a well-documented look at the impact of disappearing factory jobs on persons with low skills, see William Julius Wilson, When Work 327 Disappears.' The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Alfred A. Knop{ 1996). 105. Tilly, "Collective Violence," p.78. 106. Robert Reid, Land Of Lost Content: The Luddite Revolt 1812 (London: Penguin, 1986). 107. Ibid., p.44. 108. Ibid., p. 45. 109. Ibid., p.26. 110. Ibid. ill. Timothy Egan, "Terrorism Now Going Homespun as Bombings in the U.S.


Beginning R: The Statistical Programming Language by Mark Gardener

correlation coefficient, distributed generation, natural language processing, New Urbanism, p-value, statistical model

For example, if you wanted to reverse their order you would type the following: > cbind(bird, bird.extra)[ii,6:1] Using cbind() is easier than the matrix() command because you retain the row and column names in the newly created matrix. It is possible to use the matrix() command, but you would then have to re-establish the names. In the following example a new matrix is created using the existing data and the new Urban data: > matrix(c(bird, Urban), ncol = 6)[ii,] [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6] [1,] 4 0 6 0 0 1 [2,] 9 3 0 0 2 9 [3,] 19 3 5 0 2 8 [4,] 46 16 8 4 0 28 [5,] 47 10 40 2 2 11 [6,] 50 0 10 7 0 9 The sort index is applied to re-order the rows. You see that the names are lost; you can add them afterwards using the rownames() and colnames() commands or you might add the dimnames = instruction to the matrix() command much as you saw previously.


pages: 525 words: 153,356

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010 by Selina Todd

"there is no alternative" (TINA), call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, different worldview, Downton Abbey, financial independence, full employment, income inequality, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Red Clydeside, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, sexual politics, strikebreaker, The Spirit Level, unemployed young men, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

In Worcester, social scientist Janet Madge discovered that large houses and gardens were not the only reason why many of the town’s salaried professionals chose to live outside the city’s boundaries; some did so because ‘they feel that it raises their status’.62 Far from recognizing that this desire for social distance posed a more pervasive threat to ‘community’ than working-class residents’ behaviour, policymakers simply pandered to it in their building plans. In 1962 journalist Bill Rogers visited Kirkby, a new ‘urban district’ on Merseyside. He found ‘housewives’ blues’ and ‘bored and frustrated teenagers’. However determined and enthusiastic the new inhabitants might be, they could never entirely overcome the problems of the estates and new towns. Their out-of-town location meant that family and neighbourhood networks were broken up, with particularly severe consequences for women, who, as Bill Rogers suggested, could experience great isolation.


Barcelona by Damien Simonis

Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, land reform, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, retail therapy, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Decades later, a society was formed to rebuild what was in hindsight considered a key work in the trajectory of one of the world’s most important modern architects. Reconstructed in the 1980s, it is a curious structure of interlocking planes – walls of marble or glass, ponds of water, ceilings and just plain nothing, a temple to the new urban environment. A graceful copy of a statue of Alba (Dawn) by Berlin sculptor Georg Kolbe (1877–1947) stands in one of the exterior areas. MUSEU D’ARQUEOLOGIA DE CATALUNYA Map 93 423 21 49; www.mac.cat; Passeig de Santa Madrona 39-41; adult/child under 16yr & senior/student €3/free/2.10; 9.30am-7pm Tue-Sat, 10am-2.30pm Sun; 55 or 193 This archaeology museum, housed in what was the Graphic Arts palace during the 1929 World Exposition, covers Catalonia and related cultures from elsewhere in Spain.


San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Where other cities might plunk another Walmart, here you’ll find Victorian storefronts selling Icelandic gamelan music and organic-cotton Mayan minidresses. Local designers win pride of place on shelves, and killer sale racks put mall mark-ups to shame. (Loyal Army Clothing, Click here, the Haight) Shopping SABRINA DALBESIO / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © What’s New Urban Farming Recent reports rank San Francisco the greenest city in North America – but you could probably guess that with a glance at SF’s Green Festival urban farming programs or the beehive-covered freeway on-ramp at Hayes Valley Farm ( Click here ). For tips on growing your own organic food, farming for kids and urban composting (now mandated by law in SF), check out workshops at SF’s nonprofit sustainable gardening program, Garden for the Environment (www.gardenfortheenvironment.org).


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 130, no. 3 (2015): 1329–67. 45 Ernst Fehr, “Degustibus Est Disputandum,” Emerging Science of Preference Formation, inaugural talk, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, October 7, 2015. 46 Alain Cohn, Ernst Fehr, and Michel Andre Marechal, “Business Culture and Dishonesty in the Banking Industry,” Nature 516 (2014): 86–89. 47 For an overview of their work, see Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole, “Mindful Economics: The Production, Consumption, and Value of Beliefs,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30, no. 3 (2016): 141–64. 48 William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1997). 49 J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016). 50 Dan Ariely, George Loewenstein, and Drazen Prelec, “’Coherent Arbitrariness’: Stable Demand Curves without Stable Preferences,”Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (2003): 73–106. 51 Daniel Kahneman, Jack L.


pages: 467 words: 149,632

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

He wrote a memo to Arnold proposing a new and staggering initiative he called Project Renaissance: “Project ‘Renaissance’ calls for a multi-force, multi-agency operation to evict 3,000 VC-NVM forces from a productive area ‘A’; to ‘rescue’ 20,000 persons in a presently VC-NVM area ‘B,’ depriving enemy forces of resource-bases; to resettle the ‘refugees’ in a prepared new urban-rural model community with agriculture and light industry; and to Chieu Hoi the abandoned VC to come over to their kinfolk in the model community.”52 Pool endorsed this proposal, noting, “Al de Grazia and I remain deeply intrigued by the possibilities of a preliminary look at where and how whole areas could be secured by the settling of 20,000 to 50,000 people in a strategic location.”53 De Grazia wrote a press release announcing this plan.


San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Where other cities might plunk another Walmart, here you’ll find Victorian storefronts selling Icelandic gamelan music and organic-cotton Mayan minidresses. Local designers win pride of place on shelves, and killer sale racks put mall mark-ups to shame. (Loyal Army Clothing, Click here, the Haight) Shopping SABRINA DALBESIO / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © What’s New Urban Farming Recent reports rank San Francisco the greenest city in North America – but you could probably guess that with a glance at SF’s Green Festival urban farming programs or the beehive-covered freeway on-ramp at Hayes Valley Farm ( Click here ). For tips on growing your own organic food, farming for kids and urban composting (now mandated by law in SF), check out workshops at SF’s nonprofit sustainable gardening program, Garden for the Environment (www.gardenfortheenvironment.org).


Fodor's Essential Belgium by Fodor's Travel Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, bike sharing, blood diamond, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Easter island, Ford Model T, gentrification, haute cuisine, index card, Kickstarter, low cost airline, New Urbanism, out of africa, QR code, retail therapy, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Cons: clumsier guests will live in fear of knocking over the antiques; rooms in the old house have been restored not modernized; there is a house dog, so those with allergies beware. DRooms from: €215 EOude Houtlei 110 P09/265–0765 wwww.theverhaegen.com a8 rooms XFree Breakfast mTram: 2. YALO $$$ | HOTEL | For those unaware, “Yalo” is a local slang term for “Wow.” Ghent’s new urban boutique hotel certainly gives off a need to impress. What else could have prompted them to build its “disco toilets”—yes, they’re public bathrooms with a big button on the wall that turns off all the lights, strobes flashing colors (epileptics beware!), and blares out deafening dance music. Pros: there’s a chef’s table in the restaurant; it’s opening the city’s first rooftop bar; there is underground parking on Vlaanderenstraat.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

Cities, in short, were microbe heavens, or, as British biochemist John Cairns put it, “graveyards of mankind.”3 The most devastating scourges of the past attained horrific proportions only when the microbes reached urban centers, where population density instantaneously magnified any minor contagion that might have originated in the provinces. And microbes successfully exploited the new urban ecologies to create altogether novel disease threats. Warfare, trade, the occasional need to put down local peasant uprisings during times of elevated taxation or famine, religious pilgrimages, and the seductive lure of the city for adventurous youth guaranteed that continuous cycles of new microbial invasions would beset urban populations which generally lacked protective immunity.

., “Homeless People and Health Care: An Unrelenting Challenge,” United Hospital Fund, Paper Series 14 (December 1990), New York. 119 R. Rosenheck, L. Frisman, and A. M. Chung, “The Proportion of Veterans Among Homeless Men,” American Journal of Public Health 84 (1994): 466–69; and Institute of Medicine (1988), op. cit. 120 K. Hopper, “New Urban Niche,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 66 (1990): 435–50. 121 Committee for the Study of the Future of Public Health, Institute of Medicine, The Future of Public Health (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1988). 122 Centers for Disease Control, “Measles—New York,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 29 (1980): 452–53; and Centers for Disease Control, “Measles—United States, First 39 Weeks of 1980,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 29 (1980): 501–2. 123 Averaged across all ages, encephalitis, which can lead to permanent brain damage and/or death, occurs in one out of every 2,000 measles cases in industrialized nations.


pages: 1,015 words: 170,908

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

We are thinking here primarily ofHannah Arendt’s notion ofthe political articulated in The Human Condition (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1958). 8. For Los Angeles, see Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 221–263. For Sa˜o Paulo, see Teresa Caldeira, ‘‘Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation,’’ Public Culture, no. 8 (1996); 303–328. 9. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994). 10. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 11. ‘‘We have watched the war machine . . . set its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but ‘l’ennemi quelconque’ [the whatever enemy].’’


A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century by Witold Rybczynski

California gold rush, City Beautiful movement, clean water, cotton gin, David Brooks, fail fast, gentleman farmer, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, joint-stock company, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, New Urbanism, place-making, scientific management, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban renewal

The renewal of other parks followed: not only the ravine area of Prospect Park, but also Boston’s Franklin Park and the Louisville park system. The entire story of Central Park is told in Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar’s The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), which is particularly good on the origins and early days of the park. David Schuyler’s The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) is a review of the impact of Olmsted’s planning ideas, and the same author’s Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing 1815–1852 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) is a useful biography of Olmsted’s chief predecessor.


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

If you needed advice on how to find your way in this topsy-turvy world, the local mosque was often the best place to look. Urbanization thus had the paradoxical effect of fueling a revival of traditional religion. One scholar has compared this dynamic in the shah’s Iran with England’s Industrial Revolution, when members of the new urban middle class reinvented religious practice by turning to John Wesley and his socially activist Methodist movement.3 Even those who directly benefited from the opportunities afforded by the shah’s modernization program could not escape the feeling of alienation. Farman Farmaian, a pioneering social worker who received her degree in the United States, understood perfectly well that her likelihood of receiving an education would have been almost zero had she been born just a few years earlier than she was.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

He declared that poor relief must be used so that the machines’ “inconvenience to individuals will be softened and mitigated, indeed, as far as it is practical.” He contended that failing to adequately do so would lead to stagnation, as people would then oppose machines the way they had in the preindustrial era.8 The rise and fall of the poor laws, discussed in chapter 11, reflected a shift in political power from the landed classes to the new urban elite, whose members saw little gain in helping people stay in the countryside. Instead, they needed workers for their factories. But the poor laws’ fall was also a consequence of the widespread belief that technology could not improve the human lot. Industrialization was advocated for in the national interest and unleashed to make sure that Britain did not lose ground to its rival nations in trade.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

It was meant to catalyze Boston’s entrepreneurial community with a cluster that was dedicated to creativity. The area’s motto, “Work, Live, Play,” was designed to appeal to 24-7 tech hipsters who wanted to have as much fun in their private lives as they had planning their start-ups. The district was a roaring success. Boston is cramped and there was robust demand for sleek new urban space. But the district always faced the problem that start-ups aren’t rich enough to outbid banks for the city’s best space. Mayor Menino didn’t want a new financial zone, but before 2020 that seemed like the future for the innovation district. The entrepreneurs relocated to cheaper, poorer parts of the city, which led to the fights over gentrification that are the topic of the next chapter.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

The growth of the economies had been spurred by the deepening impact of the Industrial Revolution (see Gordon, 2015), which had introduced major new technologies (railroads, electricity, steamships, cars, indoor plumbing, new ways of producing clothes, machines to produce many manufactured goods, petroleum as a source of energy, and so on) that were changing the world in truly radical ways. That revolution required huge investments, and was accompanied by an accelerating process of urbanization. It was fed by large migratory movements, both within countries (from rural areas to the new urban centers, where the industrial enterprises were being set up) and between countries, toward new and still largely underpopulated countries. Machines had been replacing human muscles in the production of old and new products, making industrial workers enormously more productive (see Gordon, 2015).


pages: 709 words: 191,147

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

For the homemade trailers as “monstrosities,” see Harold Martin, “Don’t Call Them Trailer Trash,” Saturday Evening Post 225, no. 5 (August 2, 1952): 24–25, 85–87; Allan D. Wallis, “House Trailers: Innovation and Accommodation in Vernacular Housing,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 3 (1989): 28–43, esp. 30–31, 34; “Trailers for Army Areas,” New York Times, March 19, 1941; Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in the Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 107–10; Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks, 203; “Trailers for Army Areas,” New York Times, March 19, 1941; and see Lucy Greenbaum, “‘Trailer Village’ Dwellers Happy in Connecticut Tobacco Field,” New York Times, April 13, 1942. 27.


Lonely Planet Iceland (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn Bain, Alexis Averbuck

Airbnb, banking crisis, car-free, carbon footprint, cashless society, centre right, DeepMind, European colonialism, Eyjafjallajökull, food miles, Kickstarter, low cost airline, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, post-work, presumed consent, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, undersea cable

Still, it wasn't enough to stave off the wave of emigration that had started: between 1870 and 1914, some 16,000 Icelanders left seeking a better life in North America. They emigrated for a number of reasons – in part because the growing fishing industry could not employ all the workers who wished to escape the hard labour of rural life and move to the new urban centres. Oh, and because of yet another volcanic eruption spewing livestock-poisoning ash (Askja, 1875). By 1918 Iceland had signed the Act of Union, which effectively released the country from Danish rule, making it an independent state within the Kingdom of Denmark. Iceland prospered during WWI as wool, meat and fish exports gained high prices.


Sweden by Becky Ohlsen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, car-free, centre right, clean water, financial independence, glass ceiling, haute couture, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, period drama, place-making, post-work, retail therapy, starchitect, the built environment, white picket fence

It’s no coincidence that two of Stockholm’s hippest icons – rock club Debaser and fashion-forward boutique Tjallamalla – have come to town. Malmö’s second wind blew in with the opening of the mammoth Öresund bridge and tunnel in 2000 (see boxed text, opposite), connecting the city to bigger, cooler Copenhagen and creating a dynamic new urban conglomeration. Such a cosmopolitan outcome seems only natural for what is Sweden’s most multicultural metropolis – 150 nationalities make up Malmö’s headcount. Here, Nordic reserve is countered by hotted-up cars with doof-doof stereos and exotic Middle Eastern street stalls. Even the city’s lively historic core echoes its multicultural past.


pages: 618 words: 180,430

The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

anti-communist, antiwork, Arthur Marwick, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business climate, Corn Laws, deep learning, Etonian, garden city movement, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, New Journalism, New Urbanism, plutocrats, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, rent control, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, V2 rocket, wage slave, women in the workforce

No axes swung over the aristocrats, but the demolition balls were swinging through their homes. Dorchester House, Lansdowne House, Chesterfield House, Sunderland House and Brooke House would all go. In their place came entertainment venues and apartments: Mrs Meyrick’s nightclubs were catering for a new urban scene which was moving from private ballrooms and dining rooms to public spaces, open to anyone with enough cash and a clean shirt front. The leaders of Edwardian high society were clear that ‘society’ as they had understood it before the war, with its strict codes, interconnected family circles and prestige, had at last gone, smashed by war and tax.


pages: 3,002 words: 177,561

Lonely Planet Switzerland by Lonely Planet

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Eyjafjallajökull, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, Higgs boson, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, smart cities, starchitect, trade route

Creations such as pumpkin gnocchi in jugged chamois meat, and wild turbot with fettuccine and basil butter are served with finesse. Il FermentoBREWERY ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.ilfermento.ch; Via Codeborgo 12; h11am-9pm Mon-Wed, to 1pm Thu-Fri, to 9pm Sat) For one of the top craft beers in town, swing across to this hip new urban microbrewery. Sip hoppy amber ales, zesty IPAs and malty bitters in the industro-cool interior or out on the pavement terrace if the sun's out. WHAT'S COOKING IN TICINO? Switzerland meets Italy in Ticino’s kitchen and some of your most satisfying eating experiences in Ticino will happen in grotti – rustic, out-of-the-way restaurants, with granite tables set up under the cool chestnut trees in summer.


pages: 695 words: 189,074

Fodor's Essential Israel by Fodor's Travel Guides

bike sharing, call centre, coronavirus, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mount Scopus, New Urbanism, Pepto Bismol, sensible shoes, starchitect, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The next move was to Ahuzat Bayit (literally, “housing estate”), an area to the north of Neve Tzedek that became the precursor of Tel Aviv. The city was named Tel Aviv in 1909; Arab riots in Jaffa in the 1920s then drove more Jews to Ahuzat Bayit, spurring further growth. Immigrants from Europe joined these Jews. These new, urban arrivals—unlike the pioneers from earlier immigrant waves—brought with them an appreciation for the arts and a penchant for sidewalk cafés, and left a strong social and cultural mark on Tel Aviv. The wave of immigration included some of the world’s leading architects of the time, who saw their new home as virtually a blank slate on which they could realize their innovative and exciting ideas about urban planning.


pages: 693 words: 204,042

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Anthropocene, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, Black-Scholes formula, Burning Man, central bank independence, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, East Village, full employment, gentrification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hive mind, income inequality, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Ken Thompson, Kim Stanley Robinson, liquidity trap, Mason jar, mass immigration, megastructure, microbiome, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, Planet Labs, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rent-seeking, Social Justice Warrior, the built environment, too big to fail

But even in the worst neighborhoods there stood some islands of success, waterproofed and pumped out and made habitable again, in many cases better than ever, or so people claimed. The mutual aid societies were making something interesting, the so-called SuperVenice, fashionably hip, artistic, sexy, a new urban legend. Some people were happy to live on the water if it was conceptualized as Venetian, enduring the mold and hassle to live in a work of art. I liked it myself. As always, each neighborhood was a little world, with a particular character. Some of them looked fine, others were bedraggled, still others abandoned.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Although we were in the middle of the countryside, the road was overflowing with pedestrians and vehicles of every conceivable kind. Played out before my eyes was the most extraordinary juxtaposition of eras: women walking with their animals and carrying their produce, farmers riding bicycles and driving pedicabs, the new urban rich speeding by in black Mercedes and Lexuses, anonymous behind darkened windows, a constant stream of vans, pick-ups, lorries and minibuses, and in the fields by the side of the road peasants working their small paddy fields with water buffalo. It was as if two hundred of years of history had been condensed into one place in this single moment of time.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

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

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

Smith, ‘San Francisco schools’ changing demographics’, San Francisco Public Press, 2 February 2015. 50. C. Hamnett, T. Butler and M. Ramsden, ‘ “I wanted my child to go to a more mixed school”: schooling and ethnic mix in East London’, Environment and Planning A 45:6 (2013), 553. 51. Michael Lind, ‘The open-borders “Liberaltarianism” of the new urban elite’, National Review, 15 September 2016. 52. R. C. Christopher, Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America’s Power Elite, New York and London, 1989: Simon & Schuster. 53. Kaufmann, ‘Is there ‘white flight’ in England and Wales?’ 54. M. J. Hetherington and J. D. Weiler, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, Cambridge, 2009: Cambridge University Press.; ‘Political polarization in the American public’, Pew Research Center; Ross Butters and Christopher Hare, ‘Three-fourths of Americans regularly talk politics only with members of their own political tribe’, Washington Post (Monkey Cage), 1 May 2017. 55.


pages: 518 words: 170,126

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

See Edward Lempinen, “Society’s Haves Getting Weary of Have-Nots,” San Francisco Chronicle, 31 October 1988; Andy Furillo, “Homeless Face Growing Hostility in Nation’s Cities,” San Francisco Examiner, 15 July 1990. 166. Ingfei Chen, “Jordan Recommends Tightening Up on Homeless,” San Francisco Chronicle, 10 July 1991. 167. Christine Spolar, “San Francisco’s New Urban Outlaws Carry Bedrolls and Sleep Outdoors,” San Francisco Chronicle, 24 November 1993. 168. April Lynch and Bill Wallace, “S.F. Sweeps Yield Few Convictions,” San Francisco Chronicle, 22 October 1993. 169. Rachel Gordon, “Board Votes Down Alioto Amnesty for Homeless,” San Francisco Examiner, 26 October 1993. 170.


Frommer's London 2009 by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

airport security, Ascot racecourse, British Empire, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Edmond Halley, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, Stephen Hawking, sustainable-tourism, urban renewal, young professional

Most visitors will spend their time in The West End, whether at Buckingham Palace, the British Museum, or the shops and theaters of Soho. You’ll find the greatest concentration of hotels and restaurants in the West End. Despite attempts to extend central London’s nocturnal life to the south side of the Thames(notably the ambitious South Bank Arts Centre—London’s energy fades when it crosses the river. Still, the new urban development of Docklands, the tourist attraction of the new Globe Theatre, and some up-and-coming residential neighborhoods are infusing energy into the area across the river. Farther west are the upscale neighborhoods of Belgravia, Kensington, Knightsbridge, Chelsea, Paddington and Bayswater, Earl’s Court, and Notting Hill.


Lonely Planet Iceland by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, banking crisis, capital controls, car-free, carbon footprint, cashless society, centre right, DeepMind, European colonialism, Eyjafjallajökull, food miles, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, presumed consent, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

Still, it wasn't enough to stave off the wave of emigration that had started: between 1870 and 1914, some 16,000 Icelanders left to seek a better life in North America. Reasons for emigrating included lack of opportunity – the growing fishing industry could not employ all the workers who wished to escape the hard labour of rural life and move to the new urban centres – and yet another volcanic eruption, Askja, in 1875, which spewed livestock-poisoning ash. By 1918 Iceland had signed the Act of Union, which effectively released the country from Danish rule, making it an independent state within the Kingdom of Denmark. Iceland prospered during WWI as wool, meat and fish exports gained high prices.


The Eternal City: A History of Rome by Ferdinand Addis

Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, Defenestration of Prague, friendly fire, gentleman farmer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, moral panic, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, plutocrats, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

At the same time, a less prominent but no less profound transformation was taking place in the old Jewish ghetto. The Tiberside slum in which the Jews had been confined had become an embarrassment to modern and liberal Rome. City planners spoke of a ‘risanamento’. The pestilential alleyways and ramshackle houses were levelled to make way for a fresh new urban district, built on the best principles of order and civic hygiene. To crown this new district, the Jewish community embarked upon the construction of a Great Synagogue, in the latest style. The old synagogues of the ghetto had been modest affairs, designed to escape notice. The new synagogue rose proudly above the Tiber bank.


pages: 796 words: 223,275

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Successful associations were those that could attract and retain the highest quality and quantity of members.40 The intensity of benign intergroup competition in the Middle Ages can be observed in the proliferation of four kinds of competing voluntary associations: cities, monasteries, guilds, and universities. We’ve already seen the expansion of new urban incorporations in Figure 9.7, and the historical record amply demonstrates the ability of people to favor some European cities over others by voting with their feet. For monasteries, Figure 10.5 shows the broad picture from the 6th to the 15th century. While the number of monasteries had been rising throughout the Early Middle Ages, their proliferation accelerated in the 10th century.


pages: 934 words: 232,651

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum

active measures, affirmative action, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, centre right, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, language of flowers, means of production, New Urbanism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Slavoj Žižek, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, work culture

In Sztálinváros, a glimpse of this appealing future finally became available in the summer of 1952, by which time the apartment blocks along May 1 Street were relatively orderly, the street itself was covered in asphalt, and the building debris and rubble had been carried away. The area had become a place where well-dressed people could go for a leisurely Sunday walk, and it soon became known as the “Switzerland of Sztálinváros.” This, in the words of the historian Sándor Horváth, was exactly what was supposed to happen. The new urban spaces would breed a new kind of worker, the “urban human”: The “urban human” leads a sober life, visits the cinema and theater or listens to the radio instead of going to the pub, wears modern and comfortable ready-made clothing. He likes going for walks and loves to spend his spare time “sensibly” on the beach.


pages: 556 words: 46,885

The World's First Railway System: Enterprise, Competition, and Regulation on the Railway Network in Victorian Britain by Mark Casson

banking crisis, barriers to entry, Beeching cuts, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, combinatorial explosion, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intermodal, iterative process, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, linear programming, low interest rates, megaproject, Network effects, New Urbanism, performance metric, price elasticity of demand, railway mania, rent-seeking, strikebreaker, the market place, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration

As stations penetrated further into the heart of cities, they became agents of slum clearance (Kellett 1969). Some of the workers expelled from the slums were relocated to new working class suburbs from which they commuted in special workmens’ trains. Municipal socialism, which began to flourish in the 1870s, gave an added impetus to town improvement. New urban facilities which had previously been promoted by individual Acts were increasingly promoted with the framework of Local Government Acts, as statutory orders approved by Parliament. Towns and cities extended their administrative boundaries, and often took the initiative for promoting projects away from private enterprise.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

During the ‘transegalitarian’ period, the scale of agricultural and even craft production did not exceed the household, and trade took place between households without the involvement of communal or regional authorities. This period ended with the emergence of Monte Albán around 700 BCE and consequently endured in that part of Mexico for roughly one millennium. Initially, status distinctions were still relatively modest in this new urban period, but gradually nobles acquired the right ‘to mobilize goods and labor as tribute or sacrifices that enacted the sacred covenant and contributed to their ability to petition the gods on behalf of their followers’.162 Originally, this should not be conceived of as centralization from above, but as a bottom-up process: Social identities were increasingly differentiated by affiliations linked to crafting, long-distance contacts, wealth and status.


pages: 941 words: 237,152

USA's Best Trips by Sara Benson

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, cotton gin, Day of the Dead, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, if you build it, they will come, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, McMansion, mega-rich, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, the High Line, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Raw bars serving oysters from the rich beds of Apalachicola Bay are everywhere, but foodies flock to Tamara’s Café Floridita for fresh seafood with a Latin twist. Outdoor tables are perched on a busy corner, perfect for people-watching. After you’ve had your fill, keep driving west, following coastal highways that move as slowly as molasses pours. Take a breather in almost too picturesque Seaside. This planned community, a 1980s laboratory for New Urbanism, may feel strangely like a movie set. That’s because it was – remember The Truman Show? Airstream trailers parked by the all-American town square sell everything from fresh-juice smoothies to grilled kabobs for picnicking at the beach. * * * Jutting into the Gulf of Mexico, windswept Cedar Key (www.cedarkey.org) is a charmingly unpretentious ensemble of ramshackle buildings, fishing boats and bird-inhabited bayous.


The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization.17 Choices about which crops and animals to farm often had less to do with brute subsistence than the burgeoning industries of early cities, notably textile production, as well as popular forms of urban cuisine such as alcoholic drinks, leavened bread and dairy products. Hunters and foragers, fishers and fowlers were no less important to these new urban economies than farmers and shepherds.18 Peasantries, on the other hand, were a later, secondary development. Wetlands and floodplains are no friends to archaeological survival. Often, these earliest phases of urban occupation lie beneath later deposits of silt, or the remains of cities grown over them.


pages: 1,006 words: 243,928

Lonely Planet Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, Burning Man, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Kickstarter, Lyft, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, remote working, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, trade route, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Vancouver wants to become the world’s ‘greenest city’ by the year 2020; it already uses less energy and land per resident than its southerly big-city neighbors. Seattle is one of the top ‘green building’ cities in the country, and Portland has nudged its carbon emissions to 21% below its 2000 levels. The ‘New Urbanism’ or ‘Urban Village’ concepts are also popular in the Pacific Northwest, emphasizing compact, walkable communities that cut down the need to drive everywhere for work, schools and shopping. These inner-city neighborhoods also facilitate a strong community feel to bring people together, a trait that can seem lost in this era of modernism and urban sprawl.


pages: 1,042 words: 273,092

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

And this is just the start: in 2011 alone, the number of hotel rooms in the city doubled, with the expectation that the figure will have doubled again over the following four years.12 Or there is Erbil, unknown to many outside the oil industry, but the main city in Iraqi Kurdistan. There, the rates at the new Erbil Rotana hotel are higher than in most of the capitals of Europe and many major cities in the US: basic rooms start at $290 per night – which includes breakfast and use of the spa (but not wi-fi).13 Major new urban centres have been founded, even including a new capital city – Astana in Kazakhstan, which has risen from the dust in less than twenty years. It is now home to a spectacular Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, designed by Norman Foster, as well as Bayterek, a 330-foot-tall tower in the shape of a tree in which nestles a golden egg, where visitors are encouraged to place their hand in an imprint formed by the President of Kazakhstan and make a wish.


pages: 492 words: 70,082

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

With an estimate of more than 40,000 stateless migrant children in the country (Archavanitkul, 1998) and the 1.2 million migrant workers living in Thailand, the country was not prepared to integrate them into its society, despite the fact that the world had become more or less borderless. Those people were marginalized in their access to major social welfare (Chantavanich S, Thailand 2003b.). Migrant workers became the new urban poor disadvantaged group; local people came to consider them undesirable. In the future, it may turn out that neither Thailand nor migrants can win from this partnership, unless Thailand obtains wisdom in the regulation and protection of these people. References Administrative Commission on Irregular Migrant Workers (ACIRW). (2002).


Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, invention of movable type, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, New Urbanism, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, plutocrats, post-truth, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

It reads like a parable about the transformation, begun with Islam and now gathering pace, of old-style Arabs into city-dwellers: the a’rabi, the peripheral, the outsider from the wilderness (albeit a wilderness well supplied with wine), is taken into the eye of the circle – admitted behind the caliphal curtain, transported into the heart of the new urban society. It also feels like the end of an era. The future of caliph-hood would be not that of al-Mahdi unknown in the wilds, but that of his son al-Rashid in his fabulous Thousand and One Nights persona, incognito in the urban wilds of Baghdad; not disbelieved in the desert but disguised in town.


pages: 935 words: 267,358

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index card, inflation targeting, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, meritocracy, Money creation, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, power law, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, twin studies, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

The most striking fact of the day was the misery of the industrial proletariat. Despite the growth of the economy, or perhaps in part because of it, and because, as well, of the vast rural exodus owing to both population growth and increasing agricultural productivity, workers crowded into urban slums. The working day was long, and wages were very low. A new urban misery emerged, more visible, more shocking, and in some respects even more extreme than the rural misery of the Old Regime. Germinal, Oliver Twist, and Les Misérables did not spring from the imaginations of their authors, any more than did laws limiting child labor in factories to children older than eight (in France in 1841) or ten in the mines (in Britain in 1842).


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

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

Be here at sunset – if you can squeeze in. URBAN WINE TASTING If you don’t have enough time to venture into wine country, you can still do a guided tasting or even sign up for a wine class at the Centro Desgustación de Concha y Toro (www.vinoscyt.com; Av Alonso de Córdova 2391; 9am-8pm Mon-Fri, 10am-2pm Sat) in Vitacura. It’s the new urban outpost of the Concha y Toro winery (Click here) and the perfect place to stop for a sampling of Viognier after hitting the barrio’s art galleries and boutiques. ÑUÑOA HBH Brewery BREWPUB ( 204-2106; www.cervezahbh.cl; Av Irarrázaval 3176; 5pm-2am Mon-Fri, from 7:30pm Sat) Beer buffs and students rave about this laid-back microbrewery.


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

Malmö 040 / POP 280,800 Once dismissed as crime-prone and tatty, Sweden’s third-largest city has rebranded itself as progressive and downright cool. Malmö’s second wind blew in with the opening of the Öresund bridge and tunnel in 2000, connecting the city to bigger, cooler Copenhagen and creating a dynamic new urban conglomeration. Such a cosmopolitan outcome seems only natural for what is Sweden’s most multicultural metropolis; 150 nationalities make up Malmö’s headcount. Here, Nordic reserve is countered by hot cars with doof-doof stereos and exotic Middle Eastern street stalls. MALMÖ CARD The Malmökortet discount card covers free bus transport, street parking, entry to several museums, and discounts at other attractions and on sightseeing tours.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

The sight of the ‘dark satanic mills’—vast, gaunt structures the size of a royal palace, set incongruously beside some little stream whose water they consumed, and belching forth pungent black smoke from a chimney the size of Trajan’s Column—came first to the textile settlements of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The appearance of factories caused the sudden growth of new urban centres. The archetype lay in Manchester, capital of Lancashire’s cotton industry. The first British Census of 1801 showed that Manchester had grown tenfold in a quarter of a century, from the proportions of a single parish to a town of 75,275 registered citizens. If population was drawn to new factory towns, it is also true that factories were drawn to the few large centres of existing population.

In the social sphere, urbanization on a massive scale brought a welter of new problems, a set of new social classes, and a crop of new public services. The latter included paved streets, city transport, street lighting, fire brigades, waterworks, gasworks, sewerage works; town-planning, hospitals, parks, and police. The old rural distinction between the nobles and the peasants was overtaken by the new urban distinction between the middle classes and the working classes. Just as the middle classes were conscious of strata within their ranks, with professional lawyers and doctors feeling much superior to traders and shopkeepers, so the working classes were channelled into hierarchies of their own. Wage-labourers formed an important sector of employees both on farms and in factories, and as ‘navvies’ on the ubiquitous construction projects.


pages: 932 words: 307,785

State of Emergency: The Way We Were by Dominic Sandbrook

anti-communist, Apollo 13, Arthur Marwick, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Doomsday Book, edge city, estate planning, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, financial thriller, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, post-war consensus, sexual politics, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Winter of Discontent, young professional

To the city fathers, however, they were welcome symbols of modernity. They even adopted the slogan ‘Leeds: Motorway City of the Seventies’, which was franked on all envelopes sent from the city to sum up its new identity as a place of ‘exciting flyovers and splendid roads’.12 For some observers, Britain’s new urban landscape was merely the outward symptom of deeper social and cultural changes that had radically altered the texture of life for millions of people. It was more than a question of washing the laundry in a machine instead of by hand, or of drinking Nescafé at breakfast instead of leaf tea, or of spending Sunday at a National Trust property instead of in church, or of going out for a curry instead of making shepherd’s pie, or even of going on holiday to Majorca rather than to Morecambe.


pages: 964 words: 296,182

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fixed income, invention of the sewing machine, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, means of production, New Journalism, New Urbanism, night-watchman state, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, unemployed young men, wage slave

The prominent participation of workers on the barricades in Paris in the three days which led to the abdication of Charles X, and in the Reform crisis in Britain, raised the question both of their continued subordinate constitutional status and of the new forms of poverty that afflicted them. In Germany, the discussion was further complicated by the difficulty of placing the new urban workers and rural migrants into the official categories of estate society. Sismondi in his New Principles of Political Economy of 1819 had introduced the term ‘proletariat’ to describe this novel phenomenon. Hegel, in The Philosophy of Right, had referred to this grouping as das Pöbel (the mob).


pages: 970 words: 302,110

A Man in Full: A Novel by Tom Wolfe

Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, hiring and firing, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South of Market, San Francisco, walking around money

The new landmarks were not office towers or monuments or city halls or libraries or museums but 7-Eleven stores. In giving directions, people would say, "You take the service road down past the 7-Eleven, and then ..." Mr. Wildrotsky loved it. It was right up his alley. 7-Eleven I He devoted an entire two weeks of the class to the study of this new urban phenomenon, 7-Eleven Land. Never before or since had Conrad ever felt so important. As he stood there in a wretched little duet bathroom in Pittsburg, looking at himself in the mirror, he remembered the way Mr. Wildrotsky had finally done everything but get down on his knees and beg him to apply to Berkeley.


In Europe by Geert Mak

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Louis Blériot, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, new economy, New Urbanism, post-war consensus, Prenzlauer Berg, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, the medium is the message, urban renewal

In that sense, Munich resembled Vienna: beneath the harmony and good cheer lay a society deeply at odds with itself, marked by great tension between rich and poor. In the space of three decades from 1880–1910, Munich grew from a provincial town into a metropolis. The population doubled, the housing was as wretched as Vienna's, but the immigrants kept on coming. Jewish merchants, scientists and bankers set the tone in this new urban climate. It was here that Hermann Tietz, of Jewish origin, inaugurated his chain of department stores: the small shopkeepers were furious. Property prices rose: Jewish financiers were blamed. Prostitution increased: people claimed that Tietz drove his salesgirls to disrepute by underpaying them.


The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

anti-communist, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, deliberate practice, edge city, falling living standards, financial independence, ghettoisation, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, immigration reform, income per capita, land reform, manufacturing employment, moral panic, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, sensible shoes, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wage slave, women in the workforce

Myers concluded that ‘the majority of the teaching staff in UCD are as unaware of ideology as are the majority of the students’.169 But the introduction of third-level student grants by the end of the 1960s, ‘grudging and ungenerous though they might be’, altered somewhat the social composition of colleges like University College Cork, with a shift within the ‘middle-class’ student body, from the offspring of propertied and professional families ‘to those of a new urban middle-class’.170 Because of the relatively small student grants, most Irish students lived modestly, in comparison to some of their European counterparts. A student at UCD in the 1960s remembered ‘how much we envied English students who were here on grants and lived like Pashas in splendid flats with their own bathrooms.


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

Leading off Scenic Hwy 30A are pristine, wild parklands like Grayton Beach State Park (www.floridastateparks.org/graytonbeach; 357 Main Park Rd, Santa Rosa Beach; car $5), considered one of Florida’s prettiest, most pristine strands. About 15 quaint communities hug the coast, some arty and funky, and some master-planned resorts with matchy-matchy architectural perfection. Of these, the most intriguing and surreal is the little village of Seaside (www.seasidefl.com), a Necco Wafer–colored town that was hailed as a model of New Urbanism in the 1980s. Seaside is such an idealized vision that, unaltered, it formed the setting for the 1998 film The Truman Show, about a man whose ‘perfect life’ is nothing but a TV show. Other variations on this theme are WaterColor, Alys Beach and Rosemary Beach. Good online resources are www.30a.com and www.visitsouthwalton.com.


pages: 1,351 words: 404,177

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cognitive dissonance, company town, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, European colonialism, false flag, full employment, Future Shock, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, systematic bias, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, walking around money, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog

He wanted them to blame outside agitators. He thought he had it wired: Chairman Otto Kerner, Illinois’s governor, was a creature of the Daley machine. What Johnson didn’t count on was Vice Chairman John Lindsay, who maneuvered himself as the Kerner Commission’s de facto chairman and saw to it the report demanded $30 billion in new urban spending—the very amount Martin Luther King had announced as the goal for his upcoming Poor People’s Campaign. Lindsay also, considering the draft report too cautious, had a young aide write an aggressive introduction and got the panel to adopt it almost verbatim. Its words were to become famous: “This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal….


Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

It’s a good place for a picnic from one of the many ethnic markets on the surrounding streets. HARBOUR REDUX: RHEINAUHAFEN London has its Docklands, Düsseldorf its Medienhafen, Hamburg its building HafenCity and now Cologne has joined the revitalised-harbour trend with the Rheinauhafen. South of the Altstadt, a new urban quarter has sprung up along a 2km stretch between the Severinsbrücke and Südbrücke bridges. Dozens of 19th-century brick buildings are taking on a second life as office, living and entertainment spaces, juxtaposed with contemporary designs ranging from bland to avant-garde. The most dramatic change to Cologne’s skyline comes courtesy of a trio of Kranhäuser (Crane Houses), huge inverted L-shaped structures that are an abstract interpretation of historic harbour cranes.


Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Other vestiges from the ancient settlement include a Roman arch (Map) from the former town wall outside the Dom and the Römerturm (Map), a tower standing among buildings at the corner of St-Apern-Strasse and Zeughausstrasse. * * * HARBOUR REDUX London has its Docklands, Düsseldorf its Medienhafen, Hamburg is building HafenCity and now Cologne has jumped on the revitalised-harbour bandwagon with the Rheinauhafen. South of the Altstadt an entire new urban quarter has sprung up along a 2km stretch between the Severinsbrücke and Südbrücke bridges. Dozens of 19th-century brick buildings are taking on a second life as luxe office, living and entertainment spaces, juxtaposed with contemporary designs ranging from bland to avant-garde. The most dramatic change to Cologne’s skyline comes courtesy of a trio of Kranhäuser (Crane Houses), huge inverted L-shaped structures that are an abstract interpretation of historic harbour cranes.


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Damon Albarn later went on to create a new virtual band, Gorillaz, in partnership with cult cartoonist and illustrator Jamie Hewlett. So where does that leave us in the noughties? In many ways, the era of MySpace, iTunes and file sharing has seen Britain’s music scene become more diverse and divided than ever. Jazz, soul, R&B and hip-hop beats have fused into a new ‘urban’ sound (summed up by artists like Jamelia, The Streets and Dizzee Rascal), while dance music continues to morph through new forms. On the pop side, singer-songwriters have made a comeback: Katie Mellua, Duffy and self-destructive songstress Amy Winehouse are flying the flag for the female artists, while Damien Rice, Ed Harcourt and ex-soldier James Blunt croon for the boys.


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

F o r a brief, v i v i d d e s c r i p t i o n o f t h i s a t r o c i o u s c r i m e , s e e M o y n a h a n , The Russian Cen­ tury, p p . 1 1 4 - 2 2 . T o k n o w this is t o u n d e r s t a n d t h e e v e n t u a l c o l l a p s e o f a r o t t e n regime. 501 LOSERS pies to new cereals, while new urban eating habits led to an increased demand for meat by those who could not afford it. In this way, more and more of Africa's food crops went to animal feed. All along, the highest natural rates of population growth in the world (3+ percent per year) were pushing farmers on to marginal soils that quickly wore out.


pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

But the flat streets of Santa Monica are still perfect for walking, jogging, biking, or taking in the sun once the morning fog lifts. Santa Monica Pier’s Pacific Park features 12 rides including a large Ferris wheel with spectacular views of the Pacific. The Third Street Promenade, once a some-what shabby outdoor mall—also one of the first in the country—is now the very model of “new” urban spaces, and one of Southern California’s favorite gathering places with its shops, cafés, and movie theaters. While undeniably a pleasant place to stroll, you’ll also want to head to historic Santa Monica, well preserved and at its best at the world-famous Santa Monica Pier. A beloved institution since 1909, it boasts a collection of classic carnival rides, seashell souvenir shops and, best of all, a genuine 1930s all-wooden merry-go-round that’s likely to be familiar to anyone who has seen The Sting.


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

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

The route incorporates the Conservatory of Mexican Plants, which houses a wonderful array of cacti and succulent species, some of which are endangered species. Excellent two-hour tours (in English) depart every Tuesday at 10am (M$80). Monthly full-moon ceremonies also take place here. Getting to the garden can seem a slightly prickly business, thanks to new urban development on the town’s outskirts that blocks the original route, but it’s worth persevering. Walk uphill from Mercado El Nigromante along Homobono and Cuesta de San José. Fork left up Montitlan past a housing development (known as Los Balcones). Continue for another 15 minutes to the main gate.


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

About 15 quaint communities hug the coast, some arty and funky, and some master-planned resorts with matchy-matchy architectural perfection. Of these, the most intriguing and surreal is the little village of Seaside (www.seasidefl.com) , a Necco Wafer–colored town that was hailed as a model of New Urbanism in the 1980s. Seaside is such an idealized vision that, unaltered, it formed the setting for the 1998 film The Truman Show, about a man whose ‘perfect life’ is nothing but a TV show. Other variations on this theme are WaterColor, Alys Beach and Rosemary Beach. Good online resources are www.30a.com and www.visitsouthwalton.com.