• Weaving a ‘weft’ for Anchorage

    A horizontal weave brings disparate threads together and creates a fabric—a metaphor for resilience.
    Anchorage, Alaska, describes itself “at the center of the periphery,” an apt expression for a city that is so distant from most of the US it is closer to Beijing than Washington DC. Yet with 300,000 residents, the city is the center of economic activity in Alaska and America’s gateway to the arctic...Read more

  • Giving thanks in the Anthropocene

    We can be thankful that we are in the midst of a golden age for cities, and their vibrant resurgence colors ominous global trends in more optimistic hues.
    In this season of thanks and celebration, those of us who are architects, planners, builders, developers, and government officials have much for which to be thankful. We wouldn’t be in these fields, if we didn’t care about beauty that is more than skin-deep. The pleasures of architecture and cities...Read more

  • Houston, build the civic space of democracy

    After Harvey, let's rebuild a city that will last for centuries and support healthy social interaction, in addition to getting people out of harm's way.
    We have all heard the Harvey wakeup call. We all know we can’t continue business as usual. We have to change our ways. We will in fact be “the city that floods” unless we stop being the “city of no limits.” Unlike previous storms, every one of us knows personally someone who was flooded out of...Read more

  • To fight global climate change, fight global sprawl

    The drive-through lifestyle, exported by America and adopted worldwide, is the "operating system for growth" that is a root cause of rising carbon emissions.
    A few years back I conducted a little experiment. I went onto a popular image-sharing website to see how difficult it might be to find new drive-through McDonalds restaurants in four different, rapidly-growing parts of the world: Brazil, India, China, and Eastern Europe. My goal wasn’t to look at...Read more