No one writer of the last 60 years has influenced urban planning and thinking as much as Jane Jacobs. It seems like just about everyone who has ever set foot in a major city has read The Death and Life of Great American Cities and most professional urban planners have embraced at least part of her … [Read more...]
E-books for everyone!
The era of liberals writing e-books about market urbanism is upon us! I knew about Matt Yglesias' upcoming "Kindle Single" The Rent is Too Damn High, but Ryan Avent's The Gated City took me by surprise. Ryan's book has a "print length" of 90 pages, costs $1.99, and despite the name "Kindle Single," … [Read more...]
“The art of doing well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion”
A paragraph on what we might today call "good transit" in Railroaded: What distinguished railroads from the natural geography through which they ran was their centrality to measures of value; they transformed everything around them. There is no such thing as a badly placed river on a mountain, … [Read more...]
Then and now, financial ruin edition
So I bought Richard White's Railroaded based on the interview Emily blogged about earlier, and so far I'm enjoying it. It can be a bit polemical ("He was an eclectic hater who hated people who often hated one another") and by page 34 I've already gotten lost a few times in railroad finance jargon, … [Read more...]
Socialism and the roads, then and now
I've been reading Stephen Goddard's Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century, and it's a great book with lots of excerpable content, but here's one thing that caught my eye on page 170. I should note that when Goddard talks about "the highwaymen," he's talking … [Read more...]
Books for Beginner Urbanists
Over at Where, Dan Lorentz identified the top 5 books that he considers “the basics of urbanism”, as well as a “Tall Stack of Other Suggestions”: Based on that library visit, on posted comments from readers, on behind-the-scenes advice from Where contributors and my interpretation—from my own … [Read more...]