I’ve asked why it is if bureaucracy and government interference are the causes of bad urbanism that the places most known for those things have the best urbanism: The Northeast, The Pacific Northwest, and Europe. To be clear, I don’t think that laissez faire capitalism is necessarily the primary cause of the woeful state of
Climate change is genocide. Sure, I’m in. If the foreseeable consequences of our behaviors in the more developed world are going to lead to the deaths of millions of people with entire human societies especially in the developing world suffering first and suffering the most then those of us who fail to alter our behaviors
We’re running, quite by accident, a nearly perfect test of the philosophy that the small project focused on marginally increasing value in a relatively undervalued neighborhood is better than a mega project designed to transform a place. It would appear to be a totally unfair fight between a project in the North End which repairs
Kunstler describes the street as embodying the public realm in America because we lack “the thousand year old cathedral plazas” of Europe. It may be overwhelmingly true for most of the United States, even absolutely so if the thousand year qualifier is added and one assumes no active precolombian places of worship, but here in
The first thing I’d do if I were in charge of the PVTA would be to go for a name change. In the lower valley a high percentage of bus users are Hispanic and, how do I explain this? Imagine if some Mexican city had a huge population of north-of-the-border retirees and its bus service
NPR and I started to part ways after September 11, 2001 due to our differing views on the wars which followed. I started seeking out news more in line with my own views and found Democracy Now! and some independent podcasts (though I’m not sure the word existed)tended to come from a perspective I could
During a week when I thought that Richard Florida’s new book would give me some insight into the urban condition, it turns out to be a book on food that sent my mind to thinking. My wife had been trying to get me to read “In Defense of Food” for months and this week I
Whenever the topic of social capital comes up I’ll say to my wife that Duncan Crary, a Troy, New York cheerleader, would know more people in the neighborhood after living here for 9 days than I would after 9 years; it’s just the nature of who he is and who I’m not. I was able
I get what I have to admit is a guilty pleasure in reading about the drama involved in placing affordable housing in suburban communities. Growing up one of my best friends lived in the town of Ludlow. Being from Springfield I would joke about Lud-where? His response was usually Lud-why? As a coach of a
The MGM resort casino was the focus of a news feature on Connecticut Public Radio last week. As one would expect from a CPB production it was generally fair, thoughtful, and well produced; it also took very few risks and generally trod the pathways one would expect. There were two glaringly contradictory “fear pairs”, each