Resources
Cities & Urbanisation
City Making
Building communities without building walls
This pervasive urban landscape is not simply the result of individual choices about where to live or create a business. It is the product of a multitude of governmental policies. In this book, I focus on one such policy: the ways in which the American legal system has empowered—and failed to empower—cities.
READ MORE
Rebel Cities
READ MORE
How to make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
What would it take to make Pittsburgh into a startup hub, like Silicon Valley? I feel like I understand Pittsburgh pretty well, because I grew up here, in Monroeville. And I understand Silicon Valley pretty well because that’s where I live now. Could you get that kind of startup ecosystem going here?
READ MORE
Jane Jacobs for the 21st Century
Photograph: Fred W McDarrah/Getty Images
In her seminal book on urban planning, The Death and Life of the Great American City, Jacobs argued that four qualities need to be present in order for a city to be great: mixed land use (creating areas that serve more than one function and thus attract more than one type of person), small block sizes (they encourage pedestrian interaction), high density, and diverse architecture (different ages and forms of buildings accommodate tenets of varying economic statuses).
READ MORE
What makes a city great? New data backs up long-held beliefs.
It doesn’t take an urban planner to know that an overabundance of modern condos, glassy office buildings, chain stores, and highly successful residents of a certain skin tone does not a great city make. This story is about turning that intuition — that cities need density, diversity, and a bit of grunge to thrive — into indisputable truth.
READ MORE
Integration Zone Planning Guidelines
Integration Zones should be prioritised relative to one another in terms of their ability to integrate significant townships with the more developed parts of the city space, i.e. according to the size and density of townships and adjacent informal settlements served by the identified Urban Hubs. The Priority Integration Zone should be the focus of as many public sector role players as appropriate, aligning public sector investment to attract and incentivize firms and households to invest their resources in Integration Zones.
READ MORE
How Stockholm Became the Ultimate Walkable City
The concept of “Vision Zero,” imported to the United States from Sweden, has been showing up in more and more American cities, from New York to Seattle. In its most basic form, the policy is this: to adopt, as an official goal, the reduction of traffic deaths and serious fatalities to zero through a combination of engineering, education, and enforcement.
READ MORE
The World’s Most Liveable City
The annual search by the magazine Monocle for the world’s most liveable cities has found that Copenhagen is where people want to be for the second consecutive year. According to Tyler Brule, the magazine’s editor, Copenhagen has an advantage over Stockholm and Helsinki, two other Scandinavian cities that are rated highly, because it lies further south, and because of the city’s more relaxed spirit.
READ MORE