an insight

A hotel that used to be a firehouse.
An apartment building that used to be a jewelry factory.
A coffee shop that used to be a gas station.

Some places carry their past with them, making their present even more compelling.

an insight

In Inclusive Transportation, Veronica Davis highlights how framing our goals shapes the solutions we create — how we define a problem determines how we solve it.

If we aim to move 50,000 vehicles, we focus on highways, wider roads, and traffic flow. But if we shift the goal to moving 50,000 people, we open the door to broader solutions — public transit, bike lanes, and walkability.

an insight

“The future of an urban form built primarily around detached single-family homes is very much in question today. Most attempts to rate cities for sustainability, as well as many commentators on city planning, leap quickly to the conclusion that the city dominated by single-family homes cannot continue. Coupled with the intellectual critique of the suburbs is a repeated analysis of trends purporting to show that baby boomers and millennials are rapidly moving back into higher-density urban places.

Nevertheless, the single-family-home-dominated tableau remains a dominant urban form throughout the United States and increasingly throughout the world.

…

an insight

“Healthy minds continuously integrate their differentiated parts. Mental-health issues all begin with impaired integration of the brain. Chaos theory observes that when a self-organizing system is not able to link differentiated parts, it moves to chaos or rigidity. The same happens with the mind—Siegel [Daniel Siegel, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine] notes that almost all mental disabilities can be categorized as chaos, rigidity, or both. Cities, too, are healthier when they link their differentiated parts.

Cities can also be overly rigid or chaotic, or find the right path in between. Rigidity often arises from centralized command and control, as in Soviet cities of the mid-twentieth century, and more recently in cities ruled by Islamic fundamentalism. In such cases, there is no place for individualism or self-expression; diversity, the source of generative capacity, is repressed. Rigid urban infrastructures are incapable of readily adapting to change.

an insight

“No walk, as far as I am concerned, is ever wasted. In contrast, for example, to a car journey. In a city—especially one dominated by cars, by individualistic rather than collective, private rather than public modes of transport—it is walking that habitually makes me feel alive. It makes me feel both vitally connected to the city's ceaseless circuits of energy and, at the same time, delicately detached from them. Stimulant, then, and narcotic.”

Matthew Beaumont, The Walker

insights

“There is much hyperventilating about helmets in cities around the world, but there is no evidence that requiring riders to wear bike helmets is more effective in decreasing injury and death rates than the very real effect of safety in numbers — the cumulative safety effect of having more people on bikes riding the streets. On the contrary, there is growing evidence that cities with helmet laws succeed only in significantly decreasing the number of people riding bikes, reducing crashes but forfeiting the safety benefits of more riders.”

“As more people bike, their visibility on the street increases. When drivers see more bike riders, they learn to expect them, to anticipate their movements. They slow down and look around when they have to share the road, which also protects people who walk, completing a virtuous cycle. By the logic of helmet proponents, European nations like Denmark and the Netherlands, with vast numbers of cyclists riding without helmets, should see sky-high rates of head injuries. Yet they are far safer than other countries and are becoming only more so as the number of cyclists increases.”

new resources

• Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

• Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb

new resources

• Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser

• Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

• Cosmopolitan Culture by Bonnie Menes Kahn

new resources

• The Option of Urbanism by Christopher B. Leinberger

• Retrofitting Suburbia by Ellen Dunham-Jones

• Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs