Josh Stephens

<div> </div> <div> I&#39;ve always wanted, but never quite had the cred, to go to Burning Man. Instead, I went to this year&#39;s rendition of <a href="http://www.parkingday.org/" target="_blank">National Park(ing) Day</a> in the hopes that it would provide a reasonable, if diminuative, substitute in temporary parks across the country. Creative minds can do a lot with 180 square feet, especially when there are straight-laced passers-by to shock and paradigms to subvert. <br /> </div>

<p> Despite the rising costs of belonging to the jet set, I took my share of flights for a few business trips and boondoggles this summer. Though most of my plane tickets were paid for, my transportation to and from my respective airports were not. Like any good urbanist, I approached each airport as a challenge to see how cheaply and quickly I could get from the airport to my in-town destination. <br /> <br /> These were challenges that I -- or, rather, the cities -- failed more often than they passed. <br />

Not until this month did a bus pass ever make its way into my wallet.

<p>American-style malls are cropping up in Siberia, and gobbling up land, to enable once-isolated Russians to consume in ways that might have been unimaginable a generation ago.</p>

<div> <br /> I once was consigned to a table full of business school students at a land-use conference at UCLA. Trying to be a good sport, I offered the only idea that I&#39;d ever had about business: car insurance charged according to miles driven. I posited that since risk and mileage were more or less correlated, it only made sense that people who drove more and incurred more risk should pay more. <span><img src="/files/u1299/Karl_Marx.jpg" width="120" height="130" align="right" /></span><br /> <br /> My tablemates stared back at me as if I had just issued a rousing recitation of <em>Das Kapital</em>. <br />