I understand that the folks at CityLab don’t know that I exist and have never heard of RationalUrbanism, but it still feels as though they really are just trying to get my goat having published yet another tribute to an American modernist whose best works appear to, on their best day and in just the
I attended the funeral of an old friend last weekend. He was 14 years my senior and we had been friends from when I was in my teens until I hit my mid thirties. He was a very significant religious leader in his faith, I became an unbeliever, and his knees and his heart didn’t
The entire family made a concerted effort this summer to expand LunaLucia’s world. She needs it. She’s too bright, too energetic, too inquisitive, and too restless to be happy just hanging around the house. It started with some walks around the house, around the block, and down to our neighborhood’s little Italian shops: a little
The remnants of Hurricane Florence making for some wet going on Maple Street last month: From my experience news outlets don’t distinguish sharply between urban, suburban, and rural areas while covering the aftermath of disasters but, for obvious reasons, I try to parse the news reports in exactly those ways. I do this because both
USA Today and 24/7 Wall Street have concluded that I live in the worst city in Massachusetts, or at least that Springfield is the worst city in which to live in the Bay State. It comes from a list of the worst cities in each state. It’s hard to imagine what the justification is for
What more can I say about MGM but that it is a game changer, and not just a game changer but a life changer. Since the development opened in August we’ve spent time on the property every weekend but one; at the movies, playing games in the arcade, listening to live music, or just resting
Check this out: It’s the Salesforce Transit Center(!) in San Francisco. In August Jim Kunstler gave it his “Eyesore of the Month” award calling it a fitting tribute to Internet Narcissism Central. As if on cue the center was shut down and will be only partially reopened because of cracks in 2 of its enormous
Maple Street and Main Street are both well built out with buildings conforming to the traditional development pattern of walkable urban environments. The only gap on Maple Street is the parking lot where this central structure used to be: And on Main Street where various building were lost to the 2011 tornado: Davenport has sketched
The suburbs, at least in their American Post War iteration sow the seeds of confusion in terms of our ability to comprehend the differences which have traditionally existed between the urban and the rural. This is not a moral argument, it is a pragmatic one, but if one believes in the onward and upward narrative
An interesting discussion has been taking place at Strong Towns about whether or not the public wants drastic change; for me there are a tremendous number of right answers to this question, all of which contain some truth and many of which seem contradictory. Do people in suburbia want to change the way they live?