Cities & Planning

The U.S. does not have a single commercial-scale offshore wind farm, but it will soon.

Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don’t resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. In the century since

The world’s biggest, most functional city might also be the most pedestrian-friendly. That’s not a coincidence.

In his new book, journalist Henry Grabar reimagines the urban streetscape.

A contract modification for more escalator and elevator maintenance services was approved by the Sound Transit Board of Directors in April, following a briefing and scrutiny in an agency committee …

The Urbanist is excited to announce our first tours of the season. The inaugural tour is 10am Saturday, May 27th with Lid I-5, a group dedicated to advocating for freeway lids over I-5 in Seattle i…

The Jumpstart Seattle tax was a take-off-the-mask moment for Seattle that is still reverberating through Seattle politics. Some would have us believe low taxes are more important than investments i…

Global Warming's Six Americas.

While not completely ignored among urbanists, for a city of its size and significance, Washington, DC—or at least its post-1968 incarnation—remains an under-historicized metropolis. To be fair, his…

Mending the “metabolic rift” of capitalism.

Do you remember Uncle Owen’s “Water Harvesters” in Star Wars, Episode IV? Water was so scarce on Luke Skywalker’s home planet, Tatooine, that they built

This is the first in a series of reading notes I’m posting as I work through a stack of texts on community and sociability. I posted an intro to

I’ve been working on communication and community online for a couple of decades, but the past few years have shaken up my understanding of what

We've made our world for cars. The automobile rules our cities, destroys our planet, poisons our air, and kills millions — every single year. Why have we built our lives around them?

Through May and June, Seattle’s City Council will be considering a comprehensive rezoning of the city’s industrial lands. The changes are a long time coming, with many fits and starts. In following…

In the second edition of Human Transit, which I’m working on how, there’s a new chapter about the need to plan for a diversity of riders, as against the classic fallacy of planning separately for different demographic groups or, even worse, dividing customers into “choice” and “captive.”  This leads me into discussing people’s ability to be […]

While the Bolt faced some challenges, the decision to pull the plug on the popular economical EV brand seems premature at best.

WIRED Brand Lab | Humans have long controlled our environments. Now, you can control the climate inside your home while being kinder to the planet, too.

After including a much-celebrated $50 million allocation for Seattle’s deadliest state highway, Aurora Avenue N, in the 2022 Move Ahead Washington transportation package, the state legislatur…

Scott Alexander pushes back against the argument that building more housing in a city will reduce housing prices in that city. He begins by noting that housing costs tend to be higher in places that are relatively dense, such as New York and San Francisco. He is aware that this argument is subject to the […]

...

Bobcat's T7X is a winner in Fast Company's 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards.

There's a wild history at the heart of their vicious fight.

Organic additives produced plasters with similar properties to sea urchin spines, mollusk shells.

California’s legislature advanced SB-233 last week. If the 14 million+ cars currently registered in the state had a 75 kWh battery, the combined energy storage would amount to just over a terawatt-hour.

What is the value of the row of trees that sit along your street? Cities in Washington are working to give those trees more importance in their planning considerations, centering urban forestry in …