May 01, 2020
Decarbonizing the Hard WayMay 19 | 9am PDT | 12pm EDT Ready for an inconvenient truth? Images of clear waterways and clean skies provide a devastating glimpse into the extent to which business-as-usual human activity impacts the planet, but they don’t depict an effective response to climate change. Climate action at the order of magnitude…
May 01, 2020
The How, What, and Where of WorkMay 12 | 9am PDT | 12pm EDT In the context of COVID-19, the term ‘essential’ has gone beyond defining indispensable activities and labor during a time of crisis and entered the realm of Orwellian doublespeak. The pandemic has only accelerated a much larger conversation being led by market…
Apr 28, 2020
The Wellbeing ImperativeApril 28, 2020 | 9am PDT | 12pm EDT As the world’s urban population continues to grow, global health is becoming increasingly synonymous with urban health. The spread of COVID-19 has revealed the extent to which cities impact what we understand about disease: population density and a world of places connected by business…
Apr 27, 2020
Beyond Megacities: Rethinking DensityMay 5 | 9am PDT | 12pm EDT Location, location, location. Repeat twice daily to justify some of the most troubling trends in modern urban development. We use location – and the idea that there’s a scarcity of lively, walkable, employment-rich city centers – to champion density as simply good urbanism, while…
Apr 13, 2020
Room for ImprovementApril 21, 2020 | 9am PDT | 12pm EDT Global orders to “shelter in place” implies housing is indeed a fundamental human right, but even a cursory reading of housing policies suggests this is an aspirational goal, at best. The economic fallout of COVID-19 has pushed two unspoken truths about housing into the…
Apr 07, 2020
How Public Transport Bounces BackApril 14, 2020 | 9am PDT | 12pm EDT “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars,” former Bogota mayor Enrique Peñalosa once said. “It’s where the rich use public transportation.” At the moment, America’s urban elites are definitely not taking transit. Trains and buses are empty save for…
Apr 07, 2020
Pandemics and the Public Realm April 7, 2020 | 9am PDT | 12pm EDT Joni Mitchell’s refrain that you “don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone” has never felt more applicable to our urban public spaces. The plazas where we congregate, the thronging walkways, the parks we think of as “the lungs of the…
Mar 20, 2020
SARS-CoV-2, or ‘COVID-19’, is quite a formidable foe. Easily transmissible, low-mortality rate, the flu-like virus spread across national borders and social strata with little discrimination. Cities and urban thinking might be fundamentally affected by the present reality of quarantine, social distancing, and global dis-connection. Will all of this drive a change in the way we…
