Since the middle of the 20th Century, no American city has experienced the severe economic shock experienced in Detroit. Analyzing the housing of the city, I found the city’s shrinking housing stock has declined at almost precisely the same amount per year, every year: 1% of the existing stock lost. This underlying regularity, independent apparent […]
Book Review: Rybczynski’s Last Harvest
Witold Rybczynski’s 2007 book Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town is truly a unique book: an accessible, detailed narrative of the process of real estate development. The book describes the construction of a subdivision named New Daleville in southern Chester County in suburban Philadelphia. Or exurban, rather, since the development is over 45 miles […]
The Paradox of Cheap Parking, in Real Time
Last spring, I heard about an interesting dataset about Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I lived for four years as an undergraduate student. Busy with the flurry of activity leading up to my completion of graduate school, I stored it away to look at later. After all, real-time information on cities is hard enough to come […]
Searching for Philadelphia’s Trinities
When I visited Philadelphia in April 2007, I stayed with my friend Emily in an improbably tiny house. She had explained that it was off a pedestrian alley off an alley – itself an unusual description – but when I entered I discovered the house had, apparently, just one room. A tiny, twisting staircase led […]
NIMBYism, Urban Development, and the Public Involvement Solution
NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) activists are one of the most important and least understood issues in contemporary American urban planning. A recent national survey found that roughly one-quarter of all Americans reported they or someone in their family has actively opposed a development project. Although opposition to development is widespread and use of […]
Biking Friday
Today for the first time in my adult life, I biked to work. My 2 mile commute from Shaw to Georgetown makes for an ideal bike commute distance. However, I usually take the G2 bus across P Street which usually takes 30 to 45 minutes since I get off at P and 30th Street in […]
The Internet as a Participation Tool
This post is Part 4 of my public participation in urban planning series, adapted from my urban planning final paper, Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning While the Internet makes possible new types of interactions between citizens and government, the purpose and structure of these interactions are not new. The section creates a […]