Over the last decade, Austin has exploded with a food truck revolution. They are so popular that temporary food truck installations on empty lots are mourned when the lot becomes ready for development and the trucks move on. But, taste aside, why do they do so well? What can we learn from them? 1 … [Read more...]
What is wrong with “How to Make an Attractive City”
“How to Make an Attractive City”, a video by The School of Life, recently gained attention in social media. Well presented and pretty much aligned with today’s mainstream urbanism, the video earned plenty of shares and few critiques. This is probably the first critique you may read.The video is … [Read more...]
Los Angeles’ Pedestrian Environment
Last week, Tyler Cowen wrote that Los Angeles is the best city in the world based on several factors, including that it's one of the best cities for walking. While he makes the valid point that LA's beautiful weather gives it an advantage over many other American cities with good walking … [Read more...]
The Value of Walkability
Last week DC Streetsblog reported on a new survey from Kaiser Permanente. The survey covers Americans' attitudes toward walking and their self-reported walking habits. While a substantial majority of people believe that walking has health benefits ranging from weight management to alleviating … [Read more...]
Fields of Dreams in Tysons Corner
Earlier this week Cap'n Transit wrote about Tysons Corner in the context of the Silver Line TIFIA loan application and Tysons' Smart Growth redevelopment. This development plan is something I am quite familiar with as it was the subject of my MA thesis, and his post brought to mind some of the weird … [Read more...]
Some Empirical Evidence on Preference for Cities
This semester I took an econometrics class because I got an MA with the bare minimum of quantitative classes. For the class, I wrote a paper asking the question, "Are consumers willing to pay a premium to live in dense urban areas?" It's easy to see that urban density is correlated with higher … [Read more...]
Mandating attractive urban design
The most recent installment of the American Enterprise Institute's series Society and Culture Outlook features a piece about the role of urban design in how people use cities. The article "A plea for beauty: a manifesto for a new urbanism" by Roger Scruton is a deviation from AEI's typically … [Read more...]
Cities and the Market Process: Part 4
This series looks at some of the ways that people organize themselves to live alongside each other in cities. Part 1 looks at inherent problems with top-down planning, and this part will expand on this issue with the specific problems of pricing government-owned land.Prices are an emergent order … [Read more...]