Why are European cities charming and American cities often so charmless? Simple, says urbanist Alain Bertaud: most American cities are zoned for single-family housing. The result is not enough customers within walking distance of a business, and not enough parking for the customers who drive. Why American cities are zoned that way is related to culture and h ... Show More
Mar 2025
CLASSIC: Closed Cities: Secret Towns Kept Off Your Maps
The majority of human beings currently live in urban areas -- and this trend seems set to continue. According to the most recent estimates, two-thirds of humanity will live in urban areas by 2050. However, not all cities are created equally. In fact, countries throughout the worl ... Show More
1h 3m
Jun 2023
David A. Banks, "The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America" (U California Press, 2023)
The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (U California Press, 2023) is the first book to explore how our cities gentrify by becoming social media influencers—and why it works.
Cities, like the people that live in them, are subject to the attention econom ... Show More
48m 23s
Jun 2023
Nicholas Dagen Bloom, "The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster: A ... Show More
33m 55s
May 2021
Kathryn Garcia on Why New York Needs a Mayor Who Understands How the City Works
Kathryn Garcia, New York City’s former sanitation commissioner and a Democrat currently running in the city’s 2021 mayoral race, discusses innovating by leveraging relationships of trust, holistic thinking as a tool to evolve municipal programs, and her plan to create “the most c ... Show More
32m 44s
Mar 2018
Please Stop Building Houses Exactly Where Wildfires Start
Built well, a city should provide a bulwark against disaster. Fundamentally, all cities are fortresses. Or at least they should be. If a city is a fortress, where’s the wall? The edges of North American cities today aren’t edge-like at all. Most of them, especially in the West, o ... Show More
5m 3s
Sep 18
New York City's Manufacturing Renaissance
New York City's Brooklyn Navy Yard has evolved from a collection of warehouses into a model for 21st-century manufacturing, where climate-tech, smart city solutions, and advanced fabrication companies grow alongside distilleries, designers, and robotics startups. Now, the mission ... Show More
8m 23s