Back in March and April, there was a belief that big and dense cities were going to pose a serious problem in the fight against COVID-19. The narrative was that the benefits of urban density suddenly flip to glaring negatives during a pandemic. Elevators are… Read More
Azeem Azhar’s recent newsletter, titled “Don’t call time on the megacity: cities will learn and adapt,” is a reminder of the tensions that cities face. There are forces of attraction. And there are also forces of repulsion. Cities all around the world continue to create… Read More
Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has a new paper out talking about “urbanization and its discontents.” In it, he argues that while cities today are working remarkably well for highly skilled people, they don’t seem to be delivering the same upward mobility to lower skilled people.… Read More
LSE Cities has just published a new report called, Living in a denser London: How residents see their homes. The goal of the research project was to better understand how modern housing projects are working (or not working) for Londoners. And so they connected with… Read More
Feargus O’Sullivan is doing a series in CityLab right now on the “home designs” that define four European cities: London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris. The first one is on London’s classic “two-up, two-down” design, which refers to a two storey home with a living room… Read More
Urban environments can be dense in many different ways. This is a topic that we have discussed on several occasions here on the blog. But this working paper by Solly Angel, Patrick Lamson-Hall, and Zeltia Gonzales Blanco — called The Anatomy of Density — is… Read More
There is something happening in many North American cities right now. We are starting to question the supremacy of zoning for only single-family homes. This past summer, the state of Oregon passed policy requiring cities of 25,000 people or more to allow duplexes, triplexes, and… Read More
In this January 2018 report from the Fraser Institute, they pegged the average population density of Paris to be about 21,067 inhabitants per square kilometer (2014 population year). It is the second densest city in their report after Hong Kong, but the densest in Europe.… Read More
This recent Streetsblog article about the possibility of turning the M Ocean View line in San Francisco into a kind of subway is a good reminder about the always important connection between transit investment and density. The question I always pose to myself is, “If… Read More
Barcelona is one of the densest cities in Europe. And Márton Mogyorósy’s recent photo series, called Barcelona from above, does an excellent job of demonstrating that. My favorite photo is this one here, showing La Barceloneta neighborhood adjacent to the beach: None of the buildings… Read More
