Jane Jacobs wasn’t optimistic about the future of civilisation. ‘We show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age,’ she declares in Dark Age Ahead, her final book published in 2004. She evidences a breakdown in family and civic life, universities which focus more on credentialling than on actually imbuing knowledge in its participants, broken feedback mechanisms in government […]
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Are New Cities Necessary?
Promotors of recently developed cities ranging from Nusantara, the freshly built capital of Indonesia, to Neom, Saudi Arabia’s futurist urban paradise, advertise them as breakthroughs in urban living. But does the world need new cities?
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Lessons from Cities and the Wealth of Nations: a manual for urban policymakers
Continuing this series of book reviews on Jane Jacobs’ works, I now turn to Cities and the Wealth of Nations. But there is already a fantastic piece on the Market Urbanism website, by Matthew Robare, who reviews this book and outlines what Jacobs overlooks in her analysis. So, this piece takes a slightly different angle: […]
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Living on the edge
“These two homes straddle a 2010 zoning boundary change. The result: The house in duplex zoning converted into two homes, and the other converted into a McMansion that cost 80% more.” – Arthur Gailes
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Elevator pitch
Why do elevators cost so much more in America? Stephen Smith’s new work breaks down the differences and points to vital reforms.
Swimming against the tide
One common anti-urbanist argument is that families simply don’t want to live in cities. But analysis by New York’s Department of City Planning (DCP) also shows that prosperous parts of New York City generally added children, at least in the decade before the rise of the COVID-19 virus. DCP divided the city into “neighborhood tabulation […]
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In Praise of Randomness
Cities have always invited us to be constantly on the move. We move around to get to work, go shopping, meet friends, attend a concert, visit an art exhibition, and take advantage of all the many activities that a metropolis offers.
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Retrospective: Sites & Services
Alain Bertaud revisits a Mumbai development project he helped design in 1983. The neighborhood is thriving.
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Dataviz links: Over time, across space
By Salim Furth
Three cool sites for data and visualizations
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Lessons from Jane Jacobs on The Economy of Cities
At the heart of Jane Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities is a simple idea: cities are the basic unit of economic growth. Our prosperity depends on the ability of cities to grow and renew themselves; neither nation nor civilisation can thrive without cities performing this vital function of growing our economies and cultivating new, and […]
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Can YIMBY policies cause large price declines?
By Salim Furth
Kevin Erdmann offers a helpful corrective to the “YIMBY triumphalism” of claiming that large relative rent declines in Austin and Minneapolis are results of YIMBY policies. He’s mostly correct, especially about the rhetoric: arguing about housing supply from short term fluctuations is like arguing about climate change based on the week’s weather. Keep your powder […]
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Revisited
Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, revolutionised urban theory. This essay kicks off a series exploring Jacobs’ influential ideas and their potential to address today’s urban challenges and enhance city living. Adam Louis Sebastian Lehodey, the author of this collection of essays, studies philosophy and economics on the […]
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The benefit-cost ratio of U.S. social housing
By Salim Furth
The benefit-cost ratio of housing supply subsidies looks terrible. And the state of research is even worse.