Urban Issues

For much of the past century, in both the United States and elsewhere, the inexorable trend has been for people to move from rural areas and towns to ever larger cities  read more »

The Road as America's Mirror

America has always defined itself by the road. Our highways are more than infrastructure; they are metaphors for freedom, movement, and agency.  read more »

1: Introduction

Demographia World Urban Areas (Built-up Urban Areas or Urban Agglomerations) is the only regularly published inventory of population, corresponding land area and population density for urban areas  read more »

Not long ago, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon were widely hailed as states with bright futures. For decades, they attracted scores of out-of-state migrants  read more »

I’ve written some versions of this topic many times over the years. Now it’s time for the latest installment.  read more »

Walk through any major American city today—San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle—and you’ll see the same troubling pattern: sidewalks turned into encampments, public parks ov  read more »

Donald Trump’s reviled takeover of the DC police and his earlier deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles serve as a direct challenge  read more »

What do cities reveal about us? Not just our engineering or art, but our longings—what we value, what we revere, how we choose to live together.  read more »

It’s been over a decade since I wrote the original “screwed generation” piece for Newsweek. In the subsequent years, the idea that younger people face a difficult future has become commonplace in public debate.  read more »

I’m an urbanist. If you’re reading this, you probably are one too. You, like me, want to make cities better places. That’s at the absolute core of being an urbanist.  read more »