Suburbs

From the dawn of the colonial era, Canada, the U.S., and Australia thrived by providing what the landless have always sought. In the vast expanses of these countries  read more »

After decades of self-celebration and relentless media hype, the great “urban renaissance” predicted by the New Urbanists—a vision of cities built by and for the creative class—has come crashing down.  read more »

Remember the young people who supposedly loved cities and rejected the suburbs? It turns out they are the ones who have been fleeing the cities since the beginning of the pandemic.  read more »

In the middle of the 20th century, there was considerable interest in developing new communities (new towns). The interest was, to some degree, driven by the establishment of new towns in nations like the United Kingdom and France, where a number of projects had been completed by 1970.  read more »

Cities evolve by either expanding, deteriorating, tearing down or preserving. Some cities like Dallas have vast vacant land and other cities have little undeveloped land. Whether a city is expanding or declining, preservation is always healthy for a city.  read more »

Whether hundreds of years ago or today, the far-reaching environmental impacts of urbanization are because cities are “a node of pure consumption existing parasitically on an extensive external resource base.”  read more »

We are entering a new urban epoch, with the potential to disrupt city life in ways not unlike that created in the shift from an industrial to what Jean Gottman described in 1983 as the “transactional city.”  read more »

"Town and country must be married and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.”
— Ebenezer Howard, 1898"

All cities must evolve over time. Those that fail to do so end up, at best, like Venice, Vienna, or Florence: lifestyle and tourist hubs. This fate now awaits our greatest urban cores if they cannot address the demographic, social, and economic forces transforming the metropolitan landscape.  read more »

The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000.  read more »

This chapter describes general urbanization trends in the United States and around the world, from 1950 to the present. Cities can be glamorous or exciting, but what matters most is how they facilitate higher incomes and standards of living.  read more »