Sprawl & Suburbia

Author and activist Jane Jacobs argued that cities thrive when they mingle “everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets.”

Legalizing Dense Development is the Single Most Effective Solution to the Housing Crisis

We Now Have Clear Proof that Building Dramatically Really Does Lower Rents, and it Works Quickly

“The American dream was Every man gets his castle ,” Todd Gannon, the head of architecture at Ohio State University's Knowlton School, told me. Above all else, the suburban life is one of independence, a self-contained homestead where the American family can realize its desire and potential, unperturbed by others. Even the family car gets its own b... See more

Suburbia is not for the most part a naturally occurring settlement pattern, and the suppression of density and traditional urban forms, in most places for coming on a century now, has made it impossible to divine public opinion. Our opinions are shaped by our surroundings and possibilities. In different circumstances, we can be different people. Of... See more

Death and Life became the most famous book on urban planning. It is fundamentally about the natural origins and benefits of “the spontaneous order.” Written a third of a century after Euclid normalized centralized planning, Death and Life rejected that precedent, arguing that throughout human history, cities had been built on spontaneity, with mill... See more

This order created uncoordinated systems that worked, without staff, as if by magic. Such was Jacobs’s “Sidewalk Ballet.” With density, she argued, came “eyes on the street,” a community-based security system that required neither barbed wire nor an extensive police presence. With wide sidewalks comes trusted interactions, even with strangers—a qua... See more

There’s a famous—to urbanists—story about Amsterdam in the 1970s. Today, Amsterdam is the poster child, almost the byword, for a quiet, clean European city that makes lots of room for pedestrians and bike riders. When people talk about “Europe” in terms of land use, they often mean, or you imagine, Amsterdam.

To the extent that the average person kn... See more

One of the greatest lessons from Jacobs is that only someone from outside the industry is capable of smacking a hornet’s nest in a way that brings about transformational change.