A tourist or even a demographer may sit at a café near the Louvre and imagine that the architecture and development of Paris looks the same, all the way to the urban fringe. Yet Paris is much more than the city proper (“Ville de Paris”). It is surrounded by the balance of the Paris urban area (“unité urbaine”), the continuous urban footprint that extends up to 20 miles (32 kilometers) in each direction and is largely suburban. read more »
Urban Issues
A Comparison of the World’s 1,000 Largest Urban Areas
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Ending The War On Communities: 14 Suggestions To Protect Neighborhoods While Providing Meaningful Housing Solutions
The debate on solving California’s housing affordability crisis has reached a fever pitch, and the level of noise is drowning out solutions. We are facing a push to indiscriminately force density on neighborhoods and a war on single-family housing, which some in Sacramento paint as inherently “racist” and “immoral.” read more »
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Is It Time To Rethink Density?
With new forecasts of record population growth across Australia’s major capital cities over the next few decades and affordability remaining a challenge, is it time to reconsider the core principles and policies that guide the management of this growth? read more »
We Need More Family Friendly Cities
My latest piece is now online at the Institute for Family Studies. It’s a look at what it would take to make more family friendly cities. Here is an excerpt: read more »
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Passenger Travel in Europe and the US: More Similar than Different
Probably one of the most enduring myths about the differences between Europe and the United States is that Europeans travel mainly by trains and transit, while Americans cling to their cars and airplanes. This misunderstanding comes in part from what I have called "Louvre Syndrome". read more »
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The Regression of America’s Big Progressive Cities
If there’s anything productive to come from his recent Twitter storm, President Trump’s recent crude attacks on Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings have succeeded in bring necessary attention to the increasingly tragic state of our cities. Baltimore’s continued woes, after numerous attempts to position itself as a “comeback city,” illustrates all too poignantly the deep-seated decay in many of our great urban areas. read more »
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Atlanta as a Maturing City
My latest piece is now online over at City Journal. It’s a look at Atlanta, now bouncing back from a very rough 10-12 year period, but looking increasingly like a city that is maturing rather than a go-go boomtown in its hypergrowth phase. Here’s an excerpt: read more »
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LSE Economist Paul Cheshire on Urban Containment and Housing Affordability
Paul Cheshire, Professor Emeritus of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, has distinguished himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent housing economists. This article discusses his recent interview with Ahir Hites, a senior research officer in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Research Department, reported in The Unassuming Economist Global Housing Watch Newslettter. read more »
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Ranking the Best & Worst Transit Agencies
The nation’s worst-managed transit systems lose 65 cents for every dollar they spend on operating costs, fill only 42 percent of their seats, carry the average urban resident just 40 round trips per year, use more energy and spew out more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than the average car, carry fewer than 14 percent of low-income workers to work, and lost 4 percent of their customers in the last four years. read more »
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St. Louis Blues
My latest article is online in City Journal and is a look at the most recent failed attempt to merge St. Louis city and St. Louis county governments in light of the backdrop of civic challenges there. Here’s an excerpt: read more »
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