Sublime

Parks are volatile places. They tend to run to extremes of popularity and unpopularity. Their behavior is far from simple. They can be delightful features of city districts, and economic assets to their surroundings as well, but pitifully few are. They can grow more beloved and valuable with the years, but pitifully few show this staying power. For

No neighborhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled, and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity. Furthermore, a neighborhood or district perfectly calculated, it seems, to fill o

While quite a few economists identified the housing bubble as it occurred, fewer grasped the consequences of a housing-price collapse for the broader economy.

Cities whose economic-development strategy is a corporate-capture strategy are typically those whose economic development director and planning director don’t talk to each other. The smart cities, like Lowell, hire a director of planning and development, who is first charged with creating a city where people want to be. Rather than trying to land n

He encouraged looking at people’s expressed preferences and behaviours—for example, drawing on where people actually chose to gather in a home, perhaps in a corner that caught the sun, or how they used public spaces—rather than an architect’s assumptions about how the city should be built.

Globalization Means Substitution