Innovations promising safety and certainty often make us more fragile and vulnerable instead.
Read More
What happens when suburban requirements clash with urban density? Often, an uninspiring hybrid that people are still willing to pay for.
Read More
From health care to the economy, the pandemic is exposing the fragility of institutions we’ve long taken for granted.
Read More
The fallout from the pandemic is spurring a housing re-shuffling in San Francisco. And not just from people fleeing the city—but people moving to the city and within the city.
Read More
Some ideas—like making sure you have an abundant, resilient food supply—seem old-fashioned or even reactionary…until a crisis hits.
Read More
An urban photographer reflects on the reactions he got when he started capturing what the American urban landscape is really like—parking lots, declining neighborhoods, tract homes, and all.
Read More
Towns and cities whose economies relied on tourism are in major trouble. Even when the economy recovers, these places won’t soon go back to business as usual. Nor should they.
Read More
Cities won’t die in a vacuum. When you see a vacant office building, what you’re really looking at is your pension fund going belly-up, a loan that won’t get repaid, services that will have to be cut.
Read More
Suppose the doomsday predictions are right and the COVID-19 crisis empties our cities. That’s not automatically good news for the suburbs.
Read More
Laws and rules often prohibit the very things that could make our neighborhoods more resilient. Like producing more of our own food — no small consideration during a time of social distancing and fragile supply chains.
Read More
We were vulnerable to a crash long before coronavirus appeared. We all made promises to ourselves and each other that we never meant to keep.
Read More
Tracing the origins of a single meal reminds us how vulnerable we are to disruptions in the global supply chain. How do we create redundancies at home?
Read More
A cautionary tale from the superheated housing market of San Francisco.
Read More
What do Soviet-era construction and 21st-century American construction have in common? More than you might think.
Read More
What if the “beautiful dream” of a Main Street urbanism isn’t available? What can be done to adapt that dream to auto-dependent suburbs? More than you might expect.
Read More
This place is a work horse. It grows small businesses from scratch without recourse to bank loans or government subsidies. It provides products and experiences that are genuinely needed in the community. And it costs almost nothing to create.
Read More
No name better symbolizes idyllic 1950s suburbia than Levittown. How these massive, master-planned communities—the epitome of America’s suburban experiment—have fared over 70 years tells a less rosy story.
Read More
Trying to navigate opaque bureaucracies, just to get permission to build something that used to be legal everywhere, is like eating Jell-O with chopsticks: tedious and unsatisfying. No wonder people find pragmatic work-arounds instead.
Read More
Bringing a neighborhood back from the brink of ruin, one building at a time, is hard, thankless work—like raising bees when you could just go buy a jar of honey. But when it works, each successful project helps “pollinate” the surrounding area with the seeds of revival, in a virtuous cycle.
Read More
The newer generation of public housing projects offer a superficially pleasant facsimile of a New Urbanist neighborhood. But these are places built all at once, to a finished state, and deeply dependent on fragile institutional arrangements.
Read More