We drove on the Autobahn today. Our Ford remained as smooth as ever. They take their cars seriously here and force regular inspections. But this got me wondering about safety records and why more countries haven’t adopted similar approaches to highway driving. Here is Germany’s… Read More
Last summer Bloomberg ran a visual essay on how America uses its land. In case some of you missed it, I thought I would share it here today. They started by breaking the country down into 6 main land uses. Each square represents about 250,000… Read More
As I am sure you have all heard, there’s a lot of debate in New York right now (city and state) about whether they should reject Amazon’s decision to open up a new headquarters in Queens. Urbanist Richard Florida has been arguing that one of… Read More
According to Amazon’s recent annual 10-K filing, the company leased and owned (most of their space is leased) about 288,419,000 square feet of space around the world at the end of 2018. Of this number, about 80% is used for “fulfillment, data centers, and other.”… Read More
I just finished watching this Bloomberg video on Shenzhen, called “Inside China’s High-Tech Dystopia.” The video obviously has a particular point of view, but there are parts of it that I wasn’t overly fussed about, such as the push toward increased factory automation. Jobs evolve.… Read More
Shaping Cities in an Urban Age is the third book to come out of the London School of Economic’s Urban Age project. It was published last fall. The first two titles were, Living in the Endless City (2011) and The Endless City (2007). If you’re… Read More
At the end of last month, Toronto City Council adopted the “Housing Now” action plan. The first phase of the plan involves the public marketing of 11 city-owned sites for the purpose of finding non-profit and private sector partners to help redevelop the lands with… Read More
This Planetizen article (2014) by Brent Toderian surfaced over the weekend. It is about tall buildings and why we should be focused more on how they are designed, as opposed to just how tall they are. Brent talks about this in terms of “density done… Read More
