Structure and agency: The seeds of sustainability for 21st century cities
Merely critiquing cities’ unsustainable throughputs is not enough, and mistaking them as parasites is even worse because it usually precipitates highly ineffective solutions (e.g., making cities less city-like). We must … Continue reading
How the City Almost Came Back
The Story of Migration’s Recessionary Bubble – When we look at the last few years of migration, we should see it as a bubble. It was never going to last … Continue reading
The problem with smart cities – India
By 15 December, 85 cities out of the total 98 included under the Smart Cities Mission had submitted their respective Smart City Plans to the ministry of urban development. Hopefully, … Continue reading
The rising metropolitan sensibility
Expansive ideas of collaboration throughout metropolitan areas appear to be spreading in the run-up toHabitat III Two major conferences in late 2015 — one in Canada, the other in Latin America … Continue reading
The Urban Planner’s Guide to a Post-COP21 World
The UN roadmap for cities …is essentially a playbook for cities with four primary objectives. The first goal is to increase the number of cities and regions implementing action plans. … Continue reading
Energy Access and Urban Poverty
The great majority of people without access to modern energy services are rural and, rightly, much of the discussion on energy access focuses on how to reach them. However, despite … Continue reading
Absolute Traffic: Infrastructural Aptitude in Urban Indonesia
This article draws attention to the emergent modes of urban sociality and circumscribed mobility that define the lives of traffic-stricken residents in the megacity of Jakarta, Indonesia. I argue that … Continue reading
How a New Kind of “Modern” Urban Development Can Include Street Vendors
City designers can recognize that popular patronage of street vending demonstrates demand for these services, and see the bottom-up tendency toward mixed-use development that blends a variety of activities at … Continue reading
Reading Development 