It’s unclear what urban planning theory has to offer a place built on thrift, austerity, and curated discomfort. How are you supposed to improve a neighborhood except by making it more comfortable, greener, prettier, more connected, more inviting, cooler?

These days, I mostly interact with China through a veil of mixed media. I put Youtube walking tours and drone videos of Chinese cities on my second monitor, expansive vistas of night skylines set to cyberpunk music. I read Chinese books and research Chinese history and watch Chinese movies. I study memes from the Chinese internet. Gathering all... See more

Perhaps it was the inflated self-importance, a sense of straddling the only two countries in the world that mattered, Middle Kingdom egocentrism meets American exceptionalism.

The ballet isn’t happening on the sidewalk anymore. You can try telling a wholesome story about the interplay of the neighborhood butcher, the baker, and the Chinese herbal medicine shop owner, to the extent that they still exist. Of course, amusing, surprising, eccentric things still occur in New York on a daily basis. But the most desirable and... See more

an exuberant story about how developing-world grit met the magic freedom dirt of America

Our experience of living in the city, our understanding of why things are the way they are, or why things might be different in the future, no longer track neatly onto land use patterns or zoning regulations. We still lead our everyday flesh-and-blood lives, interacting with a few people and places, constrained by the physical limits of time and... See more

Yet Flushing grew and flourished as a working-class neighborhood despite being far from the urban core; without high-tech and high-skilled workers; without bike lanes; without green roofs; without meaningful community participation in the public process; without affordable housing either, really.

We were first immigrants, and then we were expats, and now we are like inhabitants of some extraterritorial, jurisdictionally unclear space.

As a good urbanist, I know I’m supposed to put the physical city experience first: nothing substitutes for the sidewalk ballet, never bet against New York, touch grass, convert offices to housing, if you are tired of the city you are tired of life.