Most cities’ zoning and development regulations obsess over things that are easy to measure, like building height and density, at the expense of the things that actually determine whether we’re building quality places.
National Zoning Atlas
The National Zoning Atlas is digitizing, demystifying, and democratizing information about zoning conditions in more than 33,000 jurisdictions in the U.S. — empowering advocates, revealing insights, and driving research.
A Case Study on Building Codes
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, building oversight in North America and Europe was minimal and inconsistent. Many cities relied on one final inspection, often conducted after completion or after occupancy had already begun. Many inspectors would issue a single “pass/fail” stamp of approval, and enforcement focused on obvious hazards rather than systematic verification of structure, materials, or systems.
The flat-pack skyscraper: how wood can shape the cities of the future
The long read: Our buildings are monuments to extraction and extreme emissions. But what if we turned from destructive concrete to timber?
Common Knowledge: Citizen-led data governance for better cities
Key lessons from the DECODE pilots and tips on how other cities and governments can apply the technologies and methods.
A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences
<strong>A bold reassessment of "smart cities" that reveals what is lost when we conceive of our urban spaces as computers</strong> Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. <i>A City Is Not a Computer</i> reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models. Shannon Mattern begins by examining the ethical and ontological implications of urban technologies and computational models, discussing how they shape and in many cases profoundly limit our engagement with cities. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the "city-as-computer" metaphor, which undergirds much of today's urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms. She shows how the public library functions as a steward of urban intelligence, and describes the scales of upkeep needed to sustain a city's many moving parts, from spinning hard drives to bridge repairs. Incorporating insights from urban studies, data science, and media and information studies, <i>A City Is Not a Computer</i> offers a visionary new approach to urban planning and design.
What if our cities were designed for wildlife as well as people?
New research argues urban planning must recognise animals, plants and ecosystems as fellow inhabitants of our cities.
The Folk Economics of Housing
Why is housing supply so severely restricted in US cities and suburbs? Urban economists offer two primary hypotheses: homeowner self-interest and political fragmentation. Homeowners, who outnumber and have organizational advantages over renters, are said to lobby against development to protect their property values. The fragmentation hypothesis emphasizes that development's negative externalities are borne locally while most of the benefits accrue regionally or nationally, leading localities to block housing. This paper offers another explanation: ordinary people simply do not believe that adding more housing to the regional stock would reduce housing prices. Across three original surveys of urban and suburban residents, only a minority of respondents say that a large, positive, regional housing supply shock would reduce prices or rents. These beliefs are weakly held and unstable (suggesting people have given the issue little thought), but respondents do have stable views about who is to blame for high housing prices: developers and landlords. Large, bipartisan supermajorities support price controls, demand subsidies, and restrictions on putative bad actors, policies which they believe would be more effective than supply liberalization for widespread affordability. We discuss the implications of these findings for efforts to expand the supply of housing.
Almost nowhere in California is building enough, according to the state. Here’s why
California ordered cities and counties to plan for 2.5 million new homes by 2030. Only five jurisdictions are on track to hit their numbers.
Habitat's road to release: 03 ReBAC on spaces - building [at] habitat
Fine-grained permissioning on top of spaces.
Do we actually know how to make cities safer for women?
Women-only buses, catcalling fines and gender-sensitive design — we've tried them all.
Exploring Rectangle Subdivisions
Last week, I saw a talk on Vuntra City, a procedurally generated city with a fully explorable city. Developer Larissa Davidova explained that she settled on using Recursive Subdivision for the city…
Data center land use issues are fake
We have plenty of land, data centers provide more revenue per unit area than any other building, and we should have way less farmland
The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry
Allusions to the “problem of metropolitan government” are often made in characterizing the difficulties supposed to arise because a metropolitan region is a legal non-entity. From this point of view, the people of a metropolitan region have no general instrumentality of government available to deal directly with the range of problems which they share in common. Rather there is a multiplicity of federal and state governmental agencies, counties, cities, and special districts that govern within a metropolitan region.This view assumes that the multiplicity of political units in a metropolitan area is essentially a pathological phenomenon. The diagnosis asserts that there are too many governments and not enough government. The symptoms are described as “duplication of functions” and “overlapping jurisdictions.” Autonomous units of government, acting in their own behalf, are considered incapable of resolving the diverse problems of the wider metropolitan community. The political topography of the metropolis is called a “crazy-quilt pattern” and its organization is said to be an “organized chaos.” The prescription is reorganization into larger units—to provide “a general metropolitan framework” for gathering up the various functions of government. A political system with a single dominant center for making decisions is viewed as the ideal model for the organization of metropolitan government. “Gargantua” is one name for it.
The Distributional Effects of Low Emission Zones: Who Benefits from Cleaner Air?
Low emission zones (LEZs) are a key instrument for improving air quality in cities, but it remains unclear how their air-quality benefits are distributed. We study 58 LEZs implemented in Germany since 2008 and decompose their benefit incidence along three margins: policy exposure, heterogeneous treatment effects, and monetary valuation assumptions. Using high-resolution spatial pollution concentration and socio-economic data in a difference-in-differences design, we document systematic differences in estimated PM2.5 reductions across neighborhoods. Within LEZs, residents with a German name origin experience larger reductions in PM2.5 concentration. Residents with a foreign name origin, however, are substantially more likely to live in LEZ areas, resulting in larger average air-quality improvements from a nationwide perspective. Across income groups, low-income residents experience larger pollution reductions and a disproportionately large share of the monetized benefits within LEZs. Nationwide, however, benefit incidence is close to proportional, again due to offsetting policy exposure. Overall, these findings suggest that place-based environmental policy can have nuanced distributional implications across population groups and depend jointly on the three distributional effect margins we identify.
A City for Children — Oakland Public Library
A City for Children — Gutman, Marta, — American cities are constantly being built and rebuilt, resulting in ever-changing skylines and neighborhoods. While the dynamic urban landscapes of New York, Boston, and Chicago have been widely studied, there is much to be gleaned from West Coast cities, especially in California, where the migration boom at the end of the nineteenth century permanently changed the urban fabric of these newly diverse, plural metropolises. In A City for Children Marta Gutman focuses on the use and reuse of everyday buildings in Oakland, California, to make the city a better place for children. She introduces us to the women who were determined to mitigate the burdens placed on working-class families by an indifferent industrial capitalist economy. Often without the financial means to build from scratch, women did not tend to conceive of urban land as a blank slate to be wiped clean for development. Gutman shows how, over and over, women instead turned private houses and even a saloon in Oakland into orphanages, kindergartens, settlement houses, and day care centers, and in the process built the charitable landscape--a network of places that was critical for the betterment of children, families, and public life. The industrial landscape of Oakland, riddled with the effects of social inequality and racial prejudice, is not a neutral backdrop in Gutman's story but an active player. Spanning one hundred years of history, A City for Children provides a compelling model for building urban institutions, and it demonstrates that children, women, charity, and reform, along with incremental construction, renovations, alterations, additions, and repurposed structures, are central to the understanding of modern cities.
Is 'Walk Score' Really Just a 'White Score'? — Streetsblog USA
A new paper argues that the popular real estate tools is driving investment to predominantly white urban neighborhoods, without expanding walkability for anyone else.
