Jun 05, 2020
The Millennial Family 82% of babies born today are children of Millennials, but you probably wouldn’t think that if you lived in New York City. Millennials who forgo the suburbs and stay in the city are delaying having children, or having fewer children, due to mounting student debt and the general unaffordability of raising a…
Jun 05, 2020
Millennials have grown up. Many people retain a misperception around this demographic’s current age, but the reality is that they are now in their mid-to-late 30s and are settling into their adult lives. As they start to have children and pursue homeownership, millennials are now increasingly turning to suburban locales that offer more space and…
Jun 05, 2020
As the Millennial generation comes of age, their preferences, which tend to diverge from those of their baby boomer parents, present cities with an opportunity to fundamentally rethink urban and suburban life. In this edition of the Big Picture, we will explore how policymakers, developers, and more are placing bets and working feverishly to retain…
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…
Mar 19, 2020
On January 21st, I traveled from Shanghai, my adopted home, via a one-day layover in Los Angeles, on my way to spend several weeks in Boston for some non-critical medical treatments. The next day, the first case of Coronavirus hit Shanghai. Four days later, my husband, who owns an import-export business joined me in the…
Mar 19, 2020
Public Health and Vital Budget were two concepts at the core of Patrick Geddes’ vision for a thriving city in his seminal 1910 essay “Cities in Evolution”. He was right, and this abrupt lockdown we are now experiencing forces us to reconsider both of them as priorities in the development of our cities. For twenty…
Mar 19, 2020
Social distancing. A blend of physical distancing and virtual organizing at a time of “pandemic peril” and “Google Urbanism” presided over by the World Health Organization and the happiness industry. In self-isolation as in lockdown, data collectors mine the coronavirus as well as the citizenry. What happens when digital surveillance becomes “good for you,” so…
Mar 19, 2020
I moved to New York on the heels of 9/11, in the summer of 2003, when the bathtub—which is what we called a massive hole in the ground that had once been the base of the Twin Towers—had been full excavated, and a discussion about rebuilding had just hit full swing. I’d just graduated with…
Mar 19, 2020
In April 2020, Kinsa, an American connected health company, announced a project tracking epidemic outbreaks with smart thermometers in collaboration with Benjamin Dalziel, an Associate Professor at Oregon State University. The project is based on Kinsa’s U.S. Health Weather Map which claimed to predict the flu season in the United States 12 weeks in advance.…
Mar 17, 2020
Caregivers play critical frontline roles in regular illnesses and especially in the Covid-19 pandemic. In the pandemic’s early stages, when our children have the flu or a bad cold, care-workers filled in so that we could continue to go to work. Throughout the pandemic, caregivers for the elderly and those with reduced mobility function as…
Mar 17, 2020
Satish will be speaking on our upcoming Big Rethink ‘Lessons For Greenfield Megaprojects’ on Tuesday May 26 – tune in to hear more insights from Sri City. The human being is a social animal but the global pandemic will have a paradigm-changing impact on social interactions, the future of city life, the built environment, mobility…
Mar 17, 2020
This article was originally published on the Fondation pour l’innovation politique’s website on April 3rd 2020. When there is great suffering and uncertainty, people are conflicted between a desire to return to normality (which, after all, is familiar) and a desire to redeem the loss of life and wealth that accompanies a meta-catastrophe by making…
