On California Infrastructure
Where to start? If this was the first lecture of a class on infrastructure, I’d probably run on for an hour about the wide variety of things and problems and places the subject covers, and then close with a proposed organizational and analytical scheme for making our way the following weeks. Part of the plan [...]
Co$t$ of $prawl?
Is sprawl costly and smart growth cheaper? That would depend on what you mean by sprawl, smart growth, and costly. If sprawl is defined as low density or fragmented development, smart growth is the opposite of sprawl, and costly is average per-capita public expenditures aggregated to the county level, then Carruthers and Ulfarsson report absolutely [...]
Markets Attack!
Abstract: Revisiting the markets vs planning debate, but this time from a position of moral and intellectual superiority. First, this post would be better titled, “Planning vs. Markets (Or, Why Plan?),” but for now I am sticking with the more iconic Hollywood/military imagery. Second, kindly enjoy this typically pithy comment on planning thought, action, and [...]
Traffic & Sprawl: When Jobs Suburbanize, Whither the Commute?
Abstract: Resolving the sprawl vs traffic debate. Not really. By R. Crane (UCLA) and D. Chatman (Rutgers). (Note: This essay originally appeared in Access magazine #23, Fall 2003, so I’ve updated the references to their subsequently published versions. The essay was in turn largely drawn from an article in Planning & Markets, later republished in [...]
Mexico City Chatter on Things Mexican, Governance & Water Reform
Abstract: Current events, bold research from the distant past, and my summer vacation. The World Planning Congress was held in Mexico City last month. I presented a progress report on my ongoing work on U.S. housing consumption trends over the past 20 years using the American Housing Survey, though I couldn’t quite get the just [...]
Los Angeles Traffic
Finally, a clear-eyed explanation. Really. Includes a modest proposal to import new highway capacity from Mexico. When not driving in southern California traffic, which I do nearly more than I can bear, I try hard not to think about it — let alone blog about it. But USC’s Peter Gordon, rumored to live in a [...]
Chinese Urban Finance Reform
The planning challenges of modern urban China are both familiar and less so. In part, they include the generic problems associated with financing fast urban growth, including managing change and the various constituencies of that change. There are also the few million details specific to the Chinese situation, ranging from the specifics of market reform [...]
Chinese Industrial Parks
The “preconference” part of this past week’s 3rd China Planning Network conference involved a visit to the Nansha planning district of Guangzhou in the red hot Pearl River Delta last weekend. Nearly halfway, as the crow flies, between Guangzhou and Hong Kong, these islands and agricultural pennisulas just opposite Shenzhen are in the midst of [...]
Public Finance Concepts for Planners
This blog is advertised as being about “planning” research – in other words, what we wish we knew about how cities work and how we hope to know how to make them work better. Instead, the post before you is more about how to explain what we already know. Perhaps, as can happen, the one [...]
Accessibility vs Mobility: A Resolution but Not Quite the Last Word
For what I trust are obvious reasons, transportation planners traditionally position “mobility” as a key performance objective. In the past decade or so, an influential group of reformers have favored supplanting that with “accessibility.” Mobility is all about getting from A to B easily, which usually means quickly. The counter-argument is that what the trip [...]
First National Study of Day Laborers
A guest blog by UCLA professor Abel Valenzuela, drawn from: On The Corner: Day Labor in the United States, by Abel Valenzuela, Jr., Nik Theodore, Edwin Meléndez, and Ana Luz Gonzalez (January 2006) They attend church, raise children and participate in community activities and institutions. Yet, when America’s day laborers go to work, they have [...]
The Work of Day Laborers: A snapshot of Abel Valenzuela
Star of stage and screen, and one of our own. Reprinted from the UCLA newsletter, “News About the College”, December 2005. Valenzuela has a Ph.D. in urban studies & planning from MIT. A summary of the recent national survey is in a separate post. ************ Growing up in East L.A., Abel Valenzuela learned to read [...]
Researching Irvine
Reforming Suburbia I teach a variable content graduate class titled, “Sprawl,” based entirely on so-called big idea books. To get the juices flowing we always start off with the highly provocative and often entertaining Suburban Nation. This year, we also read the avowedly neutral anti-sprawl survey Limitless City and 2 new books with more honest [...]
Smart Growth with Chinese Characteristics
The scale and scope of urban change in contemporary China are essentially unprecedented, with its cities, average incomes, and middle class each growing annually by sizable percentages amidst an even more rapid transition to a market-based economy. The country reportedly has more than 100 cities of over 1 million population and a rising number in [...]
Sprawl and the American Dream: Reviews of Suburban Nation, How Cities Work, and Picture Windows (2002)
(More recycled material, to make amends for lack of recent new blog content — although I do aspire to, at some point, Beckett-like celebrity for a sparse, austere approach to content. These reviews were originally published in JAPA, 2002. Though uncredited due to that journal’s policy, my pal Lisa Schweitzer coauthored the first draft. P.S. [...]
Egypt’s Zabaleen & Competing Visions of Privatization
I know even less about this topic than usual but let me say that the evolving story of the Zabaleen is far more inspiring than I understood before our visit, and as good an example I know of how the privatization debate is less over private vs public than the details. It is all about [...]
Cairo Itinerary
As mentioned in other posts, I am in Cairo for a week or so. My wife suspects I am taking some kind of vacation, sans family baggage, but I can assure you this is honest work, especially if you too are wondering why I haven’t met whichever pressing deadline I owe you. Perhaps the itinerary [...]
“If it made sense, that would be a very powerful idea;” or Land as a Transportation Planning Tool
Let’s get this much straight at the beginning: Land is a critical transportation planning element and you’d have to be oblivious to the world around you to even imagine otherwise. Plus, other physical planning strategies to deal with traffic don’t seem to work. People keep driving more and more, everywhere. That said, it’s fair to [...]
Medieval Inner-City Redevelopment
Field trip to not-sprawl I am in Cairo with 20 Masters and PhD planning students, toward no real end beyond learning what we can in the time we have about current prospects for the physical city as well as elements of its anti-poverty and pro-environment programs. As a metropolitan area of 15 million plus, and [...]
Sprawl, I Hardly Know Ye
I am behind with other things so to fill space & time I’m recycling my 1997 letter to the editors of JAPA, commenting on the now famous point/counterpoint articles on sprawl by Gordon & Richardson and Ewing in the previous issue. It is kind of hard to find otherwise (if anyone was looking). This letter [...]