Showing all posts tagged #urban-planning:

Part 3: The first walkable city in America in a century

February 20th, 2024

A new city has been proposed in California, and I’ve never been more captivated by a vision for the future of my home state in my lifetime. This post is part of a series I’m writing about this bold proposal. As an urbanism nerd, the aspect of California Forever’s plan that I was most eager to hear about was land use and urban planning for the new city. From reading the ballot initiative and speaking with their team, I was pleased to see that ...

Part 2: Cluster development preserves California’s landscape

February 19th, 2024

A new city has been proposed in California, and I’ve never been more captivated by a vision for the future of my home state in my lifetime. This post is part of a series I’m writing about this bold proposal. One of the most essential parts of California Forever’s proposal to build a new city is the idea of clustered development, which is the #1 most impactful strategy we can adopt for environmental conservation while also giving humans places...

Part 1: The story so far of California Forever

February 18th, 2024

A new city has been proposed in California, and I’ve never been more captivated by a vision for the future of my home state in my lifetime. This post is part of a series I’m writing about this bold proposal. California Forever was founded by Jan Sramek in 2017 as a way to create the missing economic engine for Solano County while helping to solve the region’s growing housing crisis in a scalable, financially self-supporting way. He began pitc...

The new city in California

February 16th, 2024

A new city has been proposed in California, and the plan is going to a vote in Solano County’s November election. The proposed location is in Solano County, about halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento, and the group behind the proposal is named California Forever. As a native Californian, I’ve never been more captivated by a vision for the future of my home state in my lifetime. This new city could make a huge impact on making housing ...

The road to hell is paved with asphalt

January 15th, 2024

Most roads are paved with asphalt. Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems with asphalt. Bricks, cobblestones, and pavers are often much better options, because: 1. Asphalt degrades fast, so once you account for maintenance, it's more expensive it first appearsAsphalt ages and falls apart quickly. It needs to be replaced after 10-15 years and starts looking pretty crummy well before then. It forms potholes and cracks quickly, especially in...

America's hidden urban laboratory: the South

June 14th, 2023

America hasn't built many walkable places in the last few decades, but there are a few exceptions. While collecting a list of these special places, I was shocked to discover that most are in the Southeast. My mental image of contemporary southern development did not include an appreciation of urbanism, walkability, and public spaces. On the contrary, it conjured images of massive highways and repetitive suburban sprawl. There certainly is ...

Urban sprawl is a tragedy of the commons

November 4th, 2021

We tend to choose larger homes than we want our neighbors to choose. The result: sprawling development that doesn't match what people actually want from their communities. People aim to maximize access and space when deciding where to live. All things equal, most people like living in places with easy access to their day-to-day life. It's nice to be able to walk your kids to kindergarten, and it's easier to keep a social life when many of yo...

OWD #5: The evolution of urban utopias (guest episode from Caos Planejado)

July 10th, 2021

Alain was interviewed by our friend Anthony for a Brazilian urbanism blog called Caos Planejado, and we thought it would be fun to cross-post it here. They discussed Brazilian cities, municipal financing, what it was like to live in NYC in the time of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, how urban planners' thinking has evolved over the course of Alain's long career, and lots more.RSS · Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Overcast Alain was interviewed by our...

OWD #4: Supersonic planes, levitating trains, & electric automobiles

December 23rd, 2020

Mobility is central to living in every city. In this episode, we discussed how different communities tackle the question of transportation, and how culture shapes how different transport technologies get adopted.RSS · Apple Podcasts · Spotify · OvercastMobility is central to living in every city. In this episode, we discussed how different communities tackle the question of transportation, and how culture shapes how different transport technol...

Topographic theory of flaking

August 16th, 2020

Natan Gesher sent me the following email after reading my post about why flaking is so widespread in San Francisco, and I thought you all might find it interesting too: I saw your blog posts about flaking and wanted to share something I've observed from moving around a bit (four years in Manhattan for university, then two years in Jerusalem, five years in Tel Aviv, two years in San Francisco, three and a half years in Manhattan, one year in S...

OWD #3: Disney World & other underworlds

August 15th, 2020

Every place has some dirty secrets, even Disney World. We all have to get rid of waste somehow! In this episode, the Bertauds and I discuss methods of sanitation and waste management from around the world, and how these hidden systems shape our cities. RSS · Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Overcast Every place has some dirty secrets, even Disney World. We all have to get rid of waste somehow! So in this episode, the Bertauds and I discuss methods o...

Chautauqua: an idea embedded in a place

July 22nd, 2020

I want to tell you about the place I spent summers growing up. It's called Chautauqua Institution, and it's one of the most special places in the world — and not just because I spent my childhood there. Chautauqua is special because it is an idea embedded in a place. The place is a small town in western New York, on the edge of the Great Lakes. Chautauqua's human-scale streets are lined with lovingly-tended gardens and charming Victorian cott...

OWD #2: Vanished in Guadalajara

July 8th, 2020

Alain and Marie-Agnes raised three children while living their nomadic lifestyle. So in this episode, we dug into how their role as parents shaped how they experience cities. Join us as we roam Bangkok, Guadalajara, Sana'a, Paris, Port-au-Prince, NYC and beyond!RSS · Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Overcast Here's the full transcript. You can also find it with synced audio here. If you'd like to correct any errors in the transcript, let me know an...

OWD #1: Tea time in Yemen

May 7th, 2020

I'm starting a podcast with my friends, Marie-Agnes and Alain Bertaud, who also happen to be the most interesting couple I know. Over the course of this first conversation, we traveled all around the globe for a whirlwind tour of the adventurous life they've led together.Audio · Photos · Transcript RSS · Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Overcast As I mentioned in my recent post, I'm starting a podcast with my friends, Marie-Agnes and Alain Bertau...

OWD #0: Welcome to Order Without Design

April 30th, 2020

I'm starting a new podcast called Order Without Design with the most interesting couple I know: Alain & Marie-Agnes Bertaud. This project is an extension of their book, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. With its focus on economic theory, you might not realize that this book is the product of the adventurous life these two have shared together. This podcast series is my excuse to hear and share those stories. Join the three of u...

Independence for whom?

March 23rd, 2019

I recently spent a day at Sea Ranch, a strange and beautiful place. Sea Ranch is a planned community with a distinctive architectural style: simple timber-frame structures clad in wooden siding, and gardens all planted with native flora. The Sea Ranch Design Committee enforces strict design rules on all 1,800 homes along that 10-mile stretch of the Northern California coast. The result is a cohesive, calming aesthetic unlike anywhere else I've...

Cities reading list

February 9th, 2019

Many people have reached out asking what books have been most impactful in shaping my views on cities. I've written and rewritten answers enough times that I figured it's most efficient if I just write it up one time here and share the link. 🙂 ~ Order Without Design by Alain Bertaud Reason to read this: Offers rigorous yet humble models for how urban systems work. This kind of analytical rigor is incredibly rare in urbanism! This was one ...

Re: For the greater good: the game theory of zoning

December 30th, 2018

Jake Auchincloss emailed me about my recent post For the greater good: the game theory of zoning and made the constructive point that a homeowner's mindset is "situation-dependent, not ingrained". At the end of the post, I had written that "Individualists and Regionalists are odd bedfellows". Jake pointed out that there may be tension at the abstract level of the Individualist-Localist-Regionalist framework, but that in practice people don't o...

Field notes: London, England

December 26th, 2018

I was in London for a conference for a few days in late October. The city was lovely, an unexpectedly nice place to wander. I came in with low expectations, expecting a drab, grey metropolis congested with traffic and filled with suited financiers scurrying from place to place. What I found was an agglomeration of charming urban villages, each with their own specific flavor. They were pedestrian-friendly, spotted with parks, and draped with tr...

Zonificación norteamericana vs japonesa

November 29th, 2018

This is a Spanish translation of notes from about a year ago. You can find the original in English here. Estas notas provienen de leer dos publicaciones del blog fantástico Urban Kchoze:Urban kchoze: Japanese zoning (aquí está la copia anotada)Urban kchoze: Euclidian zoning (aquí está la copia anotada) El sistema japonés es inclusivo, distinto al sistema americano que es exclusivo. La forma típica de zonificación en America se llama zonificac...

For the greater good: the game theory of zoning

November 16th, 2018

Pro-housing advocates criticize "NIMBYs" as being uncooperative and selfish. However that's not how the so-called NIMBYs see themselves. The difference is a question of the granularity of your analysis. Individualists vs Localists A question I hear a lot is: "Why do NIMBY homeowners support zoning laws? Isn't it in their best interest to allow for the highest and best use so that they can sell their own property for the maximum price? Don't t...

City review: Manchester, England

November 8th, 2018

Update: A few people have criticized my spending only a single Friday night in Manchester. I meant to highlight the fact that that my experience isn't comprehensive, not to imply I think I have some deep understanding of the place after just one short weekend. However I realize it may have come off as the exact opposite. So to clarify the limited scope of this post: I was in Manchester for a short time, and some specific differences in culture...

Learning Economics From Walt Disney World clipping

October 10th, 2018

By David M. Levy, reason.com October 1st, 1975 Libertarians who are no doubt accustomed to meeting their ideas in caricature have probably been told that in a libertarian world—one with private streets, private mass transit, private utilities of all descriptions, private ownership of redwood trees and alligators—everything would have an explicit price to it. To walk on the streets, to visit the parks, individuals would be required to make an ...

Notes on the streetcars vs buses debate

September 3rd, 2018

This was originally published in Oct 2015. It's a controversial question whether streetcar (also known as trams, trolleys) or bus rapid transit systems (BRT) are a better investment to solve cities' challenge of offering short-distance transit options. The two offer similar stop spacing, and both share the road with cars. However, they differ greatly in their cost structure, flexibility, and public image. Some notes on the subject... The arg...

A public bus named desire

September 2nd, 2018

This was originally published in Nov 2015. When I first stumbled across the streetcar vs bus rapid transit (BRT) debate, I was strongly biased towards streetcars. My opinion was largely shaped by the few weeks I spent in Berlin this past summer. While I was in Germany, I relied most heavily on Berlin's friendly yellow Metrotrams. I really only used the U-bahn and S-bahn when I had to make long, cross-city trips, where the travel time differen...

City review: A day in Bangalore

August 2nd, 2018

I spent Friday, 9 March 2018 in Bangalore, India, the last of the cities I visited that week. Of the five, Bangalore was the one that pleasantly surprised me the most. I had never been to India before, and I prepared myself for an underdeveloped, hectic urban experience. Its infrastructure was substandard, and it was not a sparkling metropolis like Singapore or a viscerally ambitious culture like Beijing, but it had a dynamism and cosmopolitan...

Agglomeration effects (might) change the YIMBY calculus

July 15th, 2018

Epistemic status: Pretty sure of the structure of the argument (~80%), not so sure of the valence of the coefficients (~60% that agglomeration does not overwhelm the supply-demand effect). Epistemic effort: Medium effort. This idea has bounced around my head for almost a year, and over that time I spoke with several friends about it. Then, I had a long conversation in which I formalized it a bit more, at which point I decided to write it down....

What do NIMBYs, lawyers, and ICE have in common?

July 11th, 2018

Zoning, occupational licensing, and immigration are all the same problem, just in different forms. They all reduce individuals' ability to move to the places with the greatest opportunity, and a few concentrated interests are overrepresented, trouncing the broader social interest. In the case of zoning, NIMBYs constrain the potential of a neighborhood or region for the sake of their own stability, comfort, and home values. Future residents are...

North American vs Japanese zoning

May 30th, 2018

I originally published these notes in April of last year in one of my old blogs. These notes come from reading two blog posts from the wonderful Urban Kchoze blog:Urban kchoze: Japanese zoning (here is the annotated and cached copy)Urban kchoze: euclidian zoning (here is the annotated and cached copy)The Japanese system is inclusionary, as contrasted to the exclusionary system common here in the US. The typical zoning form in America is calle...

Japanese street networks

May 22nd, 2018

I originally published this in May of last year in Idea Collector, one of my old blogs. Epistemic status: This is a quick write up of my personal experience wandering Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo last May. I'd be curious to learn how it compares to objective measures, models, others' experience, and so on! Epistemic effort: I noted my impressions in bullet-point form while wandering around the cities, then when I returned from the trip I spent ~1h ...

Continuous urbanization in Japan

May 21st, 2018

I originally published this in May of last year in Idea Collector, one of my old blogs. Epistemic status: This is a quick write up of my personal experience wandering Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo last May. I'd be curious to learn how it compares to objective measures, models, others' experience, and so on! Epistemic effort: I noted my impressions in bullet-point form while wandering around the cities, then when I returned from the trip I spent ~1h ...

City review: A day in Jakarta

May 21st, 2018

I spent Thursday, 8 March 2018 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Of the cities I visited during this trip, Jakarta was the one I disliked most. I try to be as positive as possible on the internet (it's just too easy to be negative), but in this case it would be ingenious. The parts of Jakarta I explored were unpleasant and a bit depressing. If Las Vegas and Mad Max had a baby... The main thoroughfare felt more like a highway than a street. This combine...

Scale-free travel

May 7th, 2018

Cities are fractal. You can always go a layer deeper and there’s just as much complexity. Following this principle, I sometimes think it might make sense to just stay in San Francisco my whole life and explore the infinite levels of that fractal. It’s cheaper than interstate or international travel anyway, and according to this framework you get the same amount of interestingness no matter how many levels deep you go. The catch is that whe...

Singapore and the international community

April 20th, 2018

A while back Daniel Frank emailed me about the essay I published about Singapore, and he was skeptical of the idea that the international community would act as a deterrent against authoritarianism in Singapore:First, I don’t think this applies to most countries (for example, look at the muted Western protest to changes in countries like Turkey and Poland). Secondly, I specifically think doesn’t apply to Singapore. The two most influential n...

A day in Singapore, Part I: Urban identity

April 19th, 2018

Epistemic status: My personal impressions from wandering the city for a day. Very likely that I'm missing important nuance in lots of places. If you notice a gap, please let me know! I'm so curious to learn more about Singapore. This is more of a diary entry than a worldview. Not sure how to put a confidence interval on that. 🙂 Epistemic effort: I jotted down notes throughout the day in the city and wrote up this post without lots of editing...

What would SB 827 mean for California?

April 17th, 2018

California's housing crisis is not a new problem, but for the first time there's a proposal facing the state legislature that could make a dent: Senate Bill 827, known as SB 827. The bill would change zoning around transit to allow for mid-rise housing. To get a sense of its potential, some friends and I created renderings to illustrate what the bill would make possible. Here's one of them: You can find the rest of the renderings plus more...

City review: A day in Saigon

March 22nd, 2018

I spent Tuesday, 6 March 2018 in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. I like the city’s pre-war name better (not a political statement—I just think it’s prettier ☺️), so I’ll use that throughout the post. Most of the signs around town used "Saigon" rather than HCMC, and some of the locals I spoke to called it that too, so I think it’s kosher. As with Beijing, I was also excited for the food, to get a sense of daily life, and of course ...

City review: A day in Beijing

March 17th, 2018

I spent Monday, 5 March 2018 in Beijing. The urbanist nerd inside of me was thrilled to see China’s capital. I’d read so much about its astounding growth and change in the past few decade—finally a chance to see it firsthand! I was also excited for the food, to get a sense of daily life, and of course to build my mental map of the city. My key takeaway is that Beijing is an epicenter of cultural and technological change, but the experience ...

Building a personal map

March 17th, 2018

I love the feeling of building up a mental map of a once-unfamiliar place. Last week I traveled to several cities that I’d never visited before (Beijing, Saigon, Singapore, Jakarta, and Bangalore), so March has been full of this sensation. I joked with friends that I was "training my neural net". I’d read a lot about two of the cities (Beijing, Singapore), knew a bit about one (Saigon), and knew close to nothing about the others (Jakarta, ...

Bike share face-off: JUMP vs GoBike

February 19th, 2018

A few weeks ago, JUMP Bikes launched a pilot of 250 bikes in SF. Their fleet is dockless and electric, and I’ve been skeptical of the hype around both features, so I was excited to give it a spin. My experience with GoBike, which by comparison both has stations and is human-powered (for now), has been fantastic. I’ve used it nearly every day (sometimes multiple times a day!) since signing up last spring. I evangelize it to anyone who will lis...

Special snowflakes and canonical examples

February 9th, 2018

I’m proud to be a beginner! But when it comes to the concrete steps of learning something new, I often feel undue shame about my approach. At first, I thought it was a fear of not knowing things or, more likely, a fear of other people seeing of me as a beginner. This doesn’t add up though. I don’t hesitate to ask questions when I’m stuck, and I pride myself on my love of picking up new skills and learning new things. In fact, going from zero ...

Why is flaking so widespread in San Francisco?

February 2nd, 2018

In an email exchange with Brian Lui, he asked me an interesting question about the rate of flaking in San Francisco: I had a brief question too. I've read that the rate of "flaking" in San Francisco is really high, because everyone is so busy and there is so much to do. But then I thought, wouldn't that lead to an extra strong norm against flaking, because your time is too precious to get flaked on by someone? Apparently this doesn't happen an...

Subsidizing Suburbia series

July 30th, 2017

Subsidizing Suburbia: A forgotten history of how the government created suburbiaFinancing Suburbia: How government mortgage policy determined where you liveExempting Suburbia: How suburban sprawl gets special treatment in our tax codePaving Suburbia: How federal projects reshaped your community around the automobile (coming soon!)Zoning Suburbia: How single-use zoning is responsible for your 45-minute commute (coming soon!)

We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars

August 19th, 2016

The way we live is shaped by our infrastructure—the public spaces, building codes, and utilities that serve a city or region. It can act as the foundation for thriving communities, but it can also establish unhealthy patterns when designed poorly.For decades, San Francisco’s waterfront was dominated by the massive Embarcadero Freeway. The Ferry Building was hidden in the shadow of a grungy overpass, and the double decker highway blocked reside...

Book notes — Walkable City

July 29th, 2016

Notes from reading Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck.Core argument: A walkable city is not just a nice, idealistic notion. Rather, it is a simple, practical-minded solution to a host of complex problems that we face as a society, problems that daily undermine our nation’s economic competitiveness, public welfare, and environmental sustainability.The American health care crisis is at its heart an urb...

Google Maps Convinced Me to Ditch My Car

June 30th, 2016

I am always a little embarrassed when people find out that I had a car in college. I'm a transit geek after all, and I always encourage friends to take public and on-demand transit rather than generate congestion and consume parking spots. Despite all this, I drove multiple times each week last year, because I felt like it was my only real option to get to places I needed to go around the Bay Area. Now, I rarely drive anymore, and I've become ...

The Death and Life of American Company Towns

June 29th, 2016

Google feeds its employees well. No Googler's desk is further than 150 feet from a "micro kitchen" stocked with goodies, and the campus is dotted with over 20 restaurants and cafes. Everything on the menu is free of charge to Googlers and their guests, and it includes specialities like creme brûlée and fresh handmade sushi. The perks of working at Google extend far beyond the free food and snacks. Google HQ contains a bowling alley, bocce ball...