Hoping to shake city folks out of our everyday stupor, Charles Wolfe has written a book on observing the city.
Charles Wolfe's new book, Seeing the City, offers a method and rationale for observing cities. "This isn’t an exhaustive cataloging of one specific and isolated feature (no matter how much you love exuberantly decorated manhole covers). Instead, the urban diarist looks for patterns that emerge when people interact with space." writes Jessica Leigh Hester for CityLab.
Wolfe's book encourages city dwellers to break out of their routines and really see what's happening in the city, what pop up stores work, which streets attract the most walkers, and what improvements really enhance the city.
FULL STORY: How to Observe Your City
Reigniting the city-building revolution
Review: In “The Unfinished Metropolis," Benjamin Schneider argues for us to look abroad for help in returning to a long-lost American art: city-building.
A masterful, human-centered defense of rent control
Book Review: "Fortunate People in a Fortunate Land" offers a human look at how rent control is more than just numbers and data in a spreadsheet.
Are cities at risk of losing squirrels?
Book review: A common backyard forager could be in decline, but without the proper data we may not know until it’s too late. Nancy Castaldo’s "Squirrel" urges us to find out.
The state-sanctioned urbicide of Austin
People don’t kill cities. Freeways do.
US to reduce Colorado River water deliveries to Mexico
A new Colorado Treaty amendment reduces Mexico’s Colorado River water allocation by 250,000 acre feet.
New Jersey’s second-largest city bans standalone data centers
Jersey City will continue to allow co-location facilities, such as those meant for research institutions that store their own data.
Amtrak not solely to blame for New Jersey commuter rail's unreliability, report finds
A new study from the Garden State Initiative found that NJ Transit’s budget grew 20% across a 4 year period, but reliability declined significantly over the same period.
EPA erases limits on planet-warming pollution from power plants
Under Monday’s plan, power plants would still have some limits on how much mercury, arsenic and other contaminants they can emit.
Phoenix announces new on-demand transit service, more frequent RAPID buses
Both new services will launch in October, and are part of Phoenix's Project Effective Access Solutions for Easing Congestion.
FREE Course: Walkable City 1: Why Walkability?
After describing his path towards focusing on walkability as the essence of good planning, Jeff Speck marches through his five principal reasons for making more walkable places.
Reinventing Malls: Planning Alchemy—Turning Gray Fields Into Gold
The course focuses on the opportunities and imperatives that shape reinvention of mall sites.
Eagle County Government
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Nashville Planning Department
The Architects Foundation
University of Cincinnati Online
The Pocatello Development Authority
The Urban Renewal Agency of the City of Pocatello
Journal of the American Planning Association