If the 20th Century was the era of America’s honeymoon with the car, the 21st has given way to the reluctant realization that this suitor has come with some baggage – air pollution, urban sprawl, obesity, and traffic congestion, to name a few. It is not just the U.S. that is contemplating a car “divorce.” …
Continue reading Is China Considering a Divorce From Its Car Culture?
Urbanization – migration away from the suburbs and to the central city – will be the biggest real estate trend in 2015, according to a new report from the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The Emerging Trends in Real Estate report, in its 36th year of publication, makes projections in commercial and residential real estate …
Continue reading Urbanization the Hottest Real-Estate Trend in 2015
The smartest move for real-estate developers is to continue investing in cities that have many transportation options available to their potential tenants. And growing cities need to embrace transit-oriented development to remain competitive. Those are the findings of a recent report that explores 10 major cities (Mexico City, Manhattan, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Washington D.C., Miami, Atlanta, Boston, and San Francisco) …
Continue reading Transit is a Commonality of Booming, Vibrant Cities
An employment opportunity brought Matt Smith (above), a 30-year old business-development manager, to the Washington D.C. area from Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania in 2009. He chose to live in Arlington because of its urban feel and plethora of transportation options. “Arlington feels like D.C. to me, but it’s cleaner and greener,” said Smith, who works at goDCgo …
Continue reading As Driving Habits Change, Places That Cater to Millennials Thrive
Big cities aren’t the only places working hard to create terrific communities. I was reminded of this fact when visiting Roanoke, Virginia over the past few days to attend CityWorks(X)po, a conference for change agents and placemakers. Going in, I was completely unfamiliar with the city, but was delighted with what I discovered there during my short visit. It …
Continue reading Roanoke, Virginia Placemaking Shows a City on the Rise
Transportation choice in America is largely a product of where one lives, which is both directly and indirectly dependent upon core values and attitudes. This is a major finding in TransitCenter’s Who’s on Board: The 2014 Mobility Attitudes Survey, and it supports the idea that transportation and land use are inextricably linked. While there is …
Continue reading Where You Live Determines Whether You Use Transit
Why do so many Americans choose to live in the suburbs, despite the increasingly long commute times and lack of community often associated with these places? Benjamin Ross, a Washington D.C.-based transit activist whose grass-roots lobbying efforts led to the planned Purple Line in Maryland, argues that suburbia has a persistent allure because it is …
Continue reading Do Americans Seek Out a Velvet Rope of Status in Suburbia?
“Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost wrote in the poem “Mending Wall.” It is a line that captures the 1914 poem’s themes of boundaries, ownership, and privacy perfectly. But today, 100 years later, fences are becoming more of a quaint notion in an increasingly urbanized world. According to the United Nations, which has been tracking world urbanization …
Continue reading Are Streets, Like Fences, A Relic of Another Era?
Ever since George Romero’s 1978 film "Dawn of the Dead" (arguably the best zombie film of all time, with a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes), zombies have symbolized modern-day anxieties, specifically American consumerism. For what is a zombie but a mindless automaton consuming everything in its path? But give me a little latitude here, because I …
Continue reading The Rebirth of the Zombie and — Dare I Say it — Walkable City
“Does a city speak?” This provocative question – posed by Saskia Sassen (pictured above) – opened the recent Mobilities in Cities: From Visible to Invisible conference at Columbia University. It’s hard to deny that a city has life, but does it live and communicate? Sassen has explored these ideas before: the juxtaposition of technology – ephemeral, artificial, …
