• The real cost of six million people in a suburban swamp

    The recent deluge that inundated Houston and left it looking like Bangladesh reveals the myopia that distorts Joel Kotkin’s latest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us . A stalwart defender of drivable suburbanism, Houston is Kotkin’s poster child, “America’s Opportunity City.” What he...Read more

  • Cleaning up a mess in Long Island City

    How landscape and urbanism came together to transform Queens Plaza—a hostile place for people on foot or bicycle.
    Note: This article is part of a collaboration between Island Press and Public Square on a series of articles based on recently published books on subjects related to urbanism. A lot of us are driven by the urge to fix damaged things, make broken things work, if not actually heal the landscape. In...Read more

  • New eco-city combines ancient practice and modern technology

    Masdar City in Abu Dhabi is designed with energy, transit, human comfort, and sustainability in mind.
    A new city rising on the edge of the Arabian desert may become one of the most sustainable cities in the world. Perhaps ironically, this attempt at creating a low-carbon city is occurring in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, which has grown wealthy exporting hydrocarbons to the world. Yet it’s not pouring...Read more

  • How green is this Apple?

    I've been a dedicated user of Apple products for 20 years—but Tim Cook's assertion that Apple's new headquarters will be the "greenest building on the planet" is absurd. To get a sense of scale of Apple's new Cupertino campus, Josh Arcurio superimposed it on Midtown Manhattan. It takes up 30-plus...Read more