Reddit reviews The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Actually there is something to this. Read Jane Jacobs' Death of Great American Cities or simple visit cities in any other part of the world.
Her theses is because we try to eliminate foot traffic and loitering and "street life" in our cities, we've effectively remove the one thing that prevents crime: having lots of neighbors on the street "just living" who act as a deterrent. It's empty streets that make crime easy because there's no one to witness or challenge the crime.
This is also related to the tendencies toward Car Culture, suburbs and Brutalist architecture in the US which look good on paper in the abstract but simply "doesn't work" for people in the city. All of these things do exactly the same thing to eliminate pedestrian traffic that eliminates the prevention of crime.
So in this sense, everyone becomes a cop without even knowing it just by being part of a community and neighborhood.
This is why it's important for American cites to move away from this traditional designs of emphasizing cars, brutalist architecture, un-walkable streets, separated zoning (vs. mixed use), lack of mass transit, etc.
I totally love the Christopher Alexander books. Definitely check out his The Timeless Way of Building which is a great companion piece to A Pattern Language. You should know that his works, while great in my opinion, are sort of considered idiosyncratic and not really in the mainstream of architecture/urban design.
Here's a short reading list you should look at:
The Smart Growth Manual and Suburban Nation by Andres Duany & Jeff Speck. Another set of sort-of-companion works, the Manual has a concrete set of recommendations inspired by the critique of modern town planning in Suburban Nation and might be more useful for your purposes.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs is probably the most famous and influential book on city planning ever and contains a lot of really original and thoughtful insights on cities. Despite being over half-a-century old it feels very contemporary and relevant.
The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler is similarly mostly a critique of modernist planning principles but is both short and very well written so I'd definitely recommend checking it out.
Makeshift Metropolis by Witold Rybczynski: I can't recommend this entire book, but it does contain (in my opinion) the best summary of the history of American urban planning. Really useful for a historical perspective on different schools of thought in city design over the years.
The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup is the book on parking policy. It's huge (700+ pages) and very thorough and academic, so it might be harder to get through than the other, more popular-audience-oriented titles on the list, but if you want to include parking as a gameplay element, I really can't recommend it highly enough. It's a problem that's thorny enough most city games just ignore it entirely: Simcity2013's developers say they abandoned it after realizing it would mean most of their players' cities would be covered in parking lots, ignoring that most actual American cities are indeed covered in parking lots.
Finally there's a bunch of great blogs/websites out there you should check out: Streetsblog is definitely a giant in transportation/design blogging and has a really capable team of journalists and a staggering amount of content. Chuck Marohn's Strong Towns blog and Podcast are a great source for thinking about these issues more in terms of smaller towns and municipalities (in contrast to Streetsblog's focus on major metropolitan areas). The Sightline Daily's blog does amazing planning/transpo coverage of the Pacific Northwest. Finally [The Atlantic Cities] (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/) blog has incredible coverage on city-issues around the world.
I hope this was helpful and not overwhelming. It's a pretty big (and in my opinion, interesting) topic, so there's a lot of ground to cover even in an introductory sense.
In this exact order:
Neat question. The two obvious big names from Urban Planning are Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. They epitomize Modernist planning and Post-Modern planning, respectively.
Robert Moses was one of the most important non-elected officials in the 20th Century, with the most popular account being Robert Caro's massive biography, The Power Broker. He was a fantastically smart legal wiz who came to power in the 1920s in New York and was the standard-bearer for sweeping top-down government approaches to development. He used his knowledge and authority to gain more and more power, creating some of the first modern highways in bridges all over New York City and state that helped influence the Interstate Highway Act and the urban car-centric model.
He can be viewed as quite a villain these days (think the unbridled power of Mr. Burns on the Simpsons), especially as academic planners now generally recognize the huge negative impacts that Modernist American planning had. There was massive economic and social displacement where things like the Cross Bronx Expressway ripped working-class immigrant neighborhoods in half, allowing commerce to escape urban centers and help create mid-century ghettoization. In short, the modernist approach can be seen as paternalistic at best and willfully concentrating power at the expense of the masses at worst. That said, depression-Era New York had huge problems (dilapidated housing and political corruption, to name two) that Moses' public works projects helped alleviate, and he was one of the country's most powerful advocates for public parks even in the face of massive growth and sprawl.
Moses sat on countless commissions and authorities for decades, his power only finally waning in the 1960s as the top-down modernist approach of (Post) World War II America faced its loudest criticisms with the related Civil Rights, Hippie, Environmentalist, Anti-Vietnam movements: Americans were finally scrutinizing the "Build Build Build Cars Cars Cars Roads Roads Roads" model that had driven cities for decades, which brings us to Jane Jacobs.
Jacobs (who got herself a Google Doodle last week for her 100th birthday), was a Greenwich Village liberal and fierce critic of the Moses-type technocratic planning. She was a community organizer who helped stop Moses as he tried to push through plans for highways in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. For those unfamiliar, these are two of the economic and social cores of New York City - she argued that roads are supposed to serve us, not destroy our important urban spaces.
If you ask a city planner what sole city planning book to read (myself included), the overwhelming favorite will be Jacobs' 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the most important critique of modernist planning to date. Instead of sprawling highways and engineering projects, Jacobs saw the healthiest urban spaces as walkable, intimate, friendly and inviting and on a human-scale. She advocated for small city blocks, much wider sidewalks and mixed-use spaces instead of the classic Sim City "Residential/Commercial/Industrial" segregated zoning.
While there has since been plenty of critique of Jacobs' post-modern model, today's planning leans much closer to Jacobs' vision (at least in academic settings): Planners are more focused than ever on the post-modern walkability, mixed-use, high-density, equal-access, participatory planning model. Although this seems like a healthier place for planning than the Moses model of old, the academic ideals clash with the huge legacy of the Modernist planning approach (We can't just up and rebuild cities every time a theory changes, after all), along with the neoliberal financialization and privatization of so many of our spaces over the last few decades, so it's still as muddy as ever.
Anyway, that's a slight oversimplification of some of the history, but Moses and Jacobs were certainly the biggest avatars of the Modernist and Post-Modernist planning movements and have been as influential in the field of planning as anybody.
Great question, and great idea! Off the top of my head:
The Basics
Landscape Architect's Portable Handbook - This one does get a bit technical, but it's a good guide.
Sociology/Psychology
Social Life of Small Urban Spaces - Just a good book about how people experience spaces
Design with People in Mind - An older film, but a classic. Funny and with great observations about how people use spaces and interact with their environment
Design Theory
Architecture: Form, Space and Order - This is a great guidebook for architects and landscape architects alike
History of Landscape Architecture
Illustrated History of Landscape Design - A great intro to the history of landscape architecture.
Urban Planning/Design
Death and Life of Great American Cities - It's a classic and should be a required read for anyone in landscape architecture or architecture
This is the short list - I'll add to it as I think of more!
The simple answer is that no, it's absolutely not too late. My suggestions, having recently been in your position:
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(1) Graduate and work for a year or two, preferably (for income purposes) in the field you majored in. Going straight from undergrad to graduate school is usually mistake, especially if you have undergraduate debt. Live frugally and pay that off. Who knows, you may end up loving the field you originally chose. You can also take a shot at an entry-level urban planning job/internship if you already have the preferred skills/connections.
(2a) During this time, read as much as you can on urban planning and urban economics. Start with classics like "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and "Triumph of the City". You can find dozens of great threads in this subreddit listing out the "essential" texts. Blogs are a great way to stay on the up and up on current issues in urban planning. A few that I like are Sidewalk Talk, Market Urbanism, and Old Urbanist. Planetizen is also a great aggregator for urban planning news and discussion.
(2b) During this time work on developing the quantitative skills that would set you apart. These include programming languages/tools for data analysis (R, Python), digital mapping (ArcGIS is preferred, but you can use QGIS for free), and math if you haven't already taken any. You can find plenty of free online courses in these areas. Having these skills will set you apart in a big way.
(3) By this point, you should have a general idea of what in particular you would like to study/research/work in within urban planning and a basic groundwork of relevant skills. This will set you apart among the applicant pool. I also had no academic/professional experience when applying, but I made it clear through my application that I was passionate, well-read, and had developed the necessary skills. It will also allow you to pick degrees (Master of City and Regional Planning? Master of Public Administration? Master of Public Policy?) and programs tailored to your specific interests. The application process can take anywhere from a year to six months, if you start studying early for the GRE. If you do end up taking a shot at graduate school, I found this guide to be very helpful.
Hope this helps.
Edit: I have no idea why this isn't formatting correctly
Portland (and Oregon as a whole) has a long history of nativism and resentment of outsiders.
Really
Long
Honestly, I'm glad I left after college. I've seen more of the country, I know about what other towns are going through. Most cities would KILL to be in the position Portland is in. Portlanders: you should be welcoming all these smart, ambitious people with open arms. You should applaud when 1 of the 500,000 bungalows in SE gets torn down to make room for more dense housing. You should tell NIMBYs who try to shut down apartment construction in transit corridors to shove it.
It really saddens me to see so many people from my homeland throw away the enormous potential their city has because they want a relatively larger slice of the pie. Please, everyone, get over your aversion to immigrants and high density housing. Portland has a once-in-a-century opportunity to transform itself in to a Great American City. And we have the resources to do it. Now we just need the grit.
I'm very inspired by Jane Jacobs, organic growth, and "density done right." I want to see more growth driven by the market, so long as those who are receiving the benefit are the ones paying the cost. The more choice, the better. I oppose Ward 11 communities having to subsidize growth on the outskirts of the city.
In Calgary, we see a focus on commuting people into a planned downtown core. Allowing more employment/education/housing options elsewhere enables a multitude of transportation options besides driving - if you so choose.
> see a lot of the country as similar to us.
Exactly! For larger cities that's the problem.
> you can't always walk safely in those cities.
Because we've eviscerated cities with car commuter infrastructure through very specific decisions that subsidize suburbs and artificially shift wealth and investment there.
You should consider reading Where We Want To Live for lots of good ideas around that or The Death and Life of Great American Cities to see just how old these ideas are.
Yeah. If you did the setting right it could make a really good lesson for kids about the dangers of privatizing everything and how it's insanely anti democracy.
Real cities work through stochasticity and barely controlled chaos. One need only look at the neighborhoods that were cut in half by the interstate highway projects of the '40s and '50s. "The village" in NYC is a great example of a neighborhood that resisted a highway and remained a thriving area to this day.
You might be interested in the work of Jane Jacobs. She would be the ultimate antithesis of the ideas in the link you posted. It would be a good source of ideas on how the players might feel about living in a privatized city.
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X
There're the epics Gotham and Greater Gotham books on NYC. Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a classic.
>Do you think it would work?
Well, yes, but it would also work if they were just walking and not praying. See, e.g. Jacobs.
>Separation of church and state
I've only read the headline: seems fine? I'm assuming that these volunteer-led patrols could also include Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Satanists, Wiccans, Atheists, etc. He does seem to be saying "just walk and talk".
the below is a bit disjointed and more like a ELI10, but based on real life ppl I know:
Paying a lot more than you needed to for something is always a bad idea, whatever its for (unless helping a friend with some new business, like buying overpriced breakfast at their new cafe).
Too many ppl think that if you bought a house to live in it doesn't matter what you paid for it since 30yrs later it should be worth more anyways. From a non-Australian perspective, this is sheer madness, and for me a great illustration of how masses of ppl just buy into bad ideas.
A real, concrete, very hard to deal with issue with overpaying for housing is that lots of ppl did so at the extreme utter super duper maximum of what they could conceivably afford if everything went well. But many signs point to that everything might not go swimmingly, from global events (US/China tariffs, climate change) to local things - an Australian recession triggered by one of the many ongoing factors, like a government unable to implement decent policies, slowing construction, slowing demand for Australian exports, yada yada.
there are real life ppl who have committed to humongous mortgages in Australia in the last 2-3 yrs which are already underwater - this means they can't sell their house if they are struggling with payments, or they bought the wrong thing, or they realised (too late) that they don't like having to pay half their income to the bank, and the associated pressures of needed to stay in that high paying job with no option of ever switching to other things they always wanted to do.
To some extent, this is a firstworldproblem, I mean they have their cake (a nice job) and the icing (a nice house) but its still stressful and lowers quality of life for ppl who are otherwise seemingly doing quite well. I'd argue that debt is a huge mental burden for a significant amount of the people holding overpriced mortgages, and there isn't enough discussion in this country about it.
Besides the personal stuff, there are a lot of big picture society level implications of high housing pricing - see Death and Life of Great American Cities for a nice intro discussion on how housing effects ppl living there.
The other thing which has been ongoing in Australia for many years now is that the very fabric of Australia is changing - I don't know of many older Aussies whose kids stay anywhere close to them - except in a few cases where the bank of mum and dad essentially bought the house or rented one of their IP's for cheap to their kids. This doesn't seem very healthy to me.
Its not good for society to form communities based mostly on income. You end up with communities which are very stratified by income and family wealth, and some books argue quite convincingly that this really makes it hard for real close knit communities to form.
In this sub many ppl blame ppl for overpaying for houses but most ppl just do what society, banks, governments, newspapers, everyone is telling them to do - to take out a max loan, put in a little bit more, then buy a house.
Leaving aside the bottom 25% or so and looking at how the middle class to upper ppl live in well off countries, like Europe and USA, nobody (hyperbole but still) has anywhere close to the debt ratio that so many Australians have. Australia has been a "lucky country" in many respects but that doesn't give Australia a magic exemption from debt.
Excellent. Thanks.
Here are the Amazon links for those books for anyone interested.
Personally, I don't think a full repeal to all of the residential zoning is the best practice. A full repeal would likely only increase land values
(here's a good explainer as to how that can happen). I do believe they need to be loosened significantly. At the rate this city is growing, it needs to have all of the tools necessary to help increase density and banning thing such as having both an ADU and DADU on single family lots and requiring their sizes to be such that they cannot accommodate families is a bad thing. Duplexes and triplexes also should be legal in single family zones. These allowances also should be paired with strategic rezones that allow for some sort of corner market/commerce zone within a 5-10 minute walkshed of every house in SFZs in order to make it reasonable for people in SFZs to live without a car in these now densified neighborhoods.
In regards to more reading: are you looking for more reading regarding Seattle zoning law exclusively or are you looking for reading recommendations that follow an urbanist bent? For Seattle specific stuff, The Urbanist and Seattle Transit Blog post a lot regarding land use in the city. If you are looking for books that talk about general city planning the gold standard is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I personally really enjoyed Walkable City, Suburban Nation, and Happy City.
Interaction Design
Interior Design
Landscape Architecture
Lighting Design
Product Design
Product Design
Sound Design
Urban Design
* Cities for People by Jan Gehl
Web Design
No, they all have much smaller block sizes and narrower streets. Even though NYC's are fairly long in one dimension, there's s fair number of avenues in NYC that cut their blocks in half, much like the mid block streets I mentioned in SLC.
There's a few interesting books that talk about how the layout of streets affect the development of a city. Green Metropolis specifically talks about NYC and The Death and Life of Great American Cities talks generally about city planning.
Not OP but you should totally read Robert Caro's The Power Broker. It's a ~1,500 page tome but it's a fantastic breakdown of the history of Moses specifically, and Jacobs as well.
Then follow it up with Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities for the counter argument. After that you can decide if you want to get into City Planning as a career. Lots of politics unfortunately...
Hah. It's complicated. I don't think there is such a list. If you build your list purely by data, let's say population or wealth, it doesn't work. Seattle, or San Francisco, which to me are T1 cities, have smaller populations than Houston, Texas, which to me is a T2 (despite being one of the biggest cities in the country).
To me, a Tier 1 city is typically one people outside of the country have heard of. New York. Boston. SF. LA. Seattle. Chicago. When I visited Paris and told people (a cab driver and a worker at a bakery) I was from New Orleans, I shit you not, they had never heard of it. I had to say, "Louis Armstrong? Jazz?" and that gave them sort of a light bulb...
A Tier 1 city has everything you expect. Density of population, residential and commercial spaces in close proximity. Insane traffic. Wealth. The aforementioned things to do. Tier 2 cities tend to be more spread out, like Houston or Atlanta (but, again, LA is insanely spread out so you can't judge cities by density, either), and they tend to have sleepier commercial activity (most stores or restaurants downtown shut down around 5-6 or are only open for lunch).
They tend to have some wealth but not crazy wealth. Charlotte, NC is flush with bank money (I think). Houston and Dallas with energy. Miami with tourism and probably drugs, I dunno. Someone mentioned Boise, I think Boise has been home to a tech scene for a long time but it hasn't ever put the city on much of a map. Oddly I was driving cross country and went past Boise and it looks absolutely miniscule, like a small town that's really proud of having a couple 50 story buildings in it. Not hating, just an example of a place having a bigger reputation than it should.
You might find this book helpful: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. I read this early on while hunting for a place to live because I wanted to really understand how to recognize a great city without having to visit many of them. I ended up traveling a lot anyway but her work is very insightful. She was instrumental in how Toronto evolved (she even had an impact on New York I believe) and I briefly lived in a neighborhood with her fingerprints all over it, that was essentially her model neighborhood. A perfect blend of medium density residential (some single family homes next to 20-30 unit apartment buildings a few blocks deep) astride a commercial corridor for groceries and entertainment -- the neighborhood is called "The Annex", check it out on Google Street view here. The neighborhood has a mix of students, professors, bankers, artists, etc. Or, it had -- I'm sure it is gentrified like crazy by now.
A Tier 1 city is also a city that is insanely expensive to live in. In San Francisco I rented a 330 sq. ft. apartment in a truly awful neighborhood for $1650/month five years ago. That was a great price back then...in New Orleans I had a 1300 sq. ft. house and was paying the equivalent of $800/month in mortgage. I paid the place off just before I moved away from there, something I never thought I'd be able to do in my lifetime. It is something I will never likely be able to do in a Tier 1 city.
So...probably more of an answer than you wanted or expected, and probably not a very helpful one. My suggestion is to think about what is important to you and find a place that has that. Do you love the outdoors? Denver/Boulder, Portland OR, Seattle, etc. are great cities with that. Do you want to spend tons of time at a beach? San Diego is pretty affordable (for California) and you get that. Do you like hiking and camping? Plenty of places to do that in texas. Find a subreddit here and ask the locals :)
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I've read it a half dozen times.
It's something I've adapted from a few sources on urban planning/design. It's something I never thought about until recently, but the way we build places can have a huge effect on the people who live in them. Personally, I noticed that I was always happier in cities where I could walk around and see other people walking around, versus when I was in small towns where I had to drive to get to anything. I couldn't put my finger on what it was, exactly, until I was in college and got to read Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities. Suddenly it all started to make sense.
If you're interested in learning more, check out New Urbanism, r/urbanplanning, and maybe a good book on the subject, like Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. This is a great place to start, it highlights some common problems in our current building patterns and pulls examples from all over the world to show ways that work better and help build happier places.
Some other good reads:
The majority of all development in DTLA is completely shortsighted and go against proper urban planning in principle. I share your frustration and I'm glad there's some of us who think what they're doing is wrong for the city and its people. The city has or now seems it had a great opportunity in making this a great city. But that seems to fade further and further. I've become more pessimistic as the years pass. Jose Huizar has become the Robert Moses of Los Angeles going on a binge rubber-stamping horrible unwelcoming structures. History tells us these developments will not have longevity thus destroying the city's appeal. And for the guy who said we need a parking lot in that development. Time will prove you wrong. Studies conclude parking is extremely detrimental to a city both in economics and property value. The people in charge of city planning should travel a bit and take note of what works and what doesn't. You would think these people are well versed and educated but that seems to prove otherwise. Maybe Jose Huizar should read a little about Jane Jacobs' legacy in standing up to bad urban planning. http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X
This would be an instant purchase for me if it was heavily based on the concepts of New Urbanism. That's really what I've been looking for in a city building sim, a game which understands and rewards the design principles most modern urban planners actually use in the real world.
I'd love a game which really allows you to get down to the street level and design cities based on pedestrian usage. I want to be able to tinker with things like sidewalk width, street trees, building height restrictions... all the little details, and see the effects of changing them. On a larger level, I'd like to be rewarded economically and environmentally for creating lovely urban neighborhoods that people would enjoy living in, on a street-by-street basis. And I'd like a game which models the long-term consequences of automobile culture as well--allow you to design those kinds of cities (Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix) but show the consequences of suburban sprawl in unhappiness, pollution, and economic problems.
Most city building sims play at too large of a scale for my taste, and often ignore what modern urban designers understand about what's important in real cities. Sim City especially has often been very guilty of this--encouraging heavily separated uses, with big zones of commercial, industrial, residential rather than the all-important "mixed-use neighborhood" where everything your citizens need is in walking distance of where they live.
A couple of books I'd recommend you read if you're interested in learning more about urban design as you develop this game:
and Jeff Speck's TED talk for a very brief overview.
Seeing that you're interested in urban geography, Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities is a must. It's not always strictly about geography, but it's probably one of the best books written about cities in the 20th century, and it can be relevant in almost any urban geography course.
Understanding Architecture: Its Elements, History, and Meaning
A Global History of Architecture
A Visual Dictionary of Architecture
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Bonus book because I like this firm's concepts:
Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution - Bjarke Ingels Group
For those who haven't read it, I highly suggest reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, even if you have only a slight interest in architecture and urban planning. It was one of the first works to argue against the (then popular) planning practices like Le Corbusier's, and Robert Moses' (who wreaked havoc on neighborhoods and championed automobile connectivity, rather than human connectivity).
Despite it being written in the 1960s, it's aged little. It's an absolutely enthralling work, and is now the standard for many urban planning decisions, thankfully.
Here is the book you are looking for: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X
you can say that.. I find that most people who share this opinion have limited life experience (younger generations). in regards to viable cities, its typically a balance of many factors, not the whole sale, and destruction of whats existing to replace with something new. You should read this; https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X
1: more intended as commentary attacking the underlying comment’s sense of “this is my neighborhood because I’m Dutch and so were the people there hundreds of years ago”. Everyone is welcome, but that attitude is kind of nativist and off putting in addition to entitled.
2: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X - The people in the community make it great again which makes it attractive for gentrification.
Woah, easy killer.
Look I get what you're saying. Highways and wide lanes seem like sexy things. That's exactly what I used to think as well before I started learning about urban planning and transit design. There's a lot of intricacies about it but here's some good beginner stuff
First, check out r/urbanplanning. Super interesting sub about the city ecosystem and how to design a successful city.
Books:
"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs. Basically the bible of city design.
"Walkable City" by Jeff Speck is also an awesome book. That guy is a great presenter as well
Videos:
How Highways Wrecked American Cities
Why Public Transportation Sucks in the US
Why Trains Suck in America
How Closing Roads Could Speed Up Traffic - The Braess Paradox
How to Fix Traffic Forever
Presentations:
Basically any presentation by Jeff Speck
What it boils down to, is you destroy the urban environment by introducing cars. They take up so much room that can be used for dense development but requiring parking sports and wide streets.
Great representation of what car do to cities
This is my last comment here. I can't argue with someone about urban development/planning if they haven't studied the topic themselves. It's a topsy-turvey thing to us living in the post automobile United States, but it makes sense after you do some research.
Enjoy!
both by Jane Jacobs. Anything by Jane Jacobs, really.
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X Highways allowed companies to expand and not have to deal with cities and thier demands. US land use is more to blame as we cannot force people to live near a train station with zoning controls like they can in other countries. Jane Jacobs says this many times that highways allowed people to live far outside the cores of cities declined because of this. She argues that we should be forced to live on top of each other.
I live in Philadelphia, and people seem to think that the homeless people are the people begging for money in front of 7/11s and on the corner. For the most part, these people choose to be actively homeless. They don't try to improve their lives. They either have addiction issues or mental issues (I see many homeless people here who clearly have mental disorders who need some kind of help).
I don't think I see actual homeless people described in the paper. Also, I don't see the need for Housing First objectives. I think getting rid of zoning laws and perhaps increasing Section 8 vouchers would do the trick. I am also skeptical of public housing initiatives, and all of my issues with them can actually be found in a non-economic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
I won't, but I will give you several sites and subreddits you should check out.
/r/urbanplanning
/r/urbandesign
/r/urbantransport
/r/highspeedrail
/r/transit
Congress for the New Urbanism
Congress for the New Urbanism's YouTube Channel
Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (planning firm)
Smart Growth Online
NewUrbanism.org
Strong Towns YouTube Channel
Notre Dame School of Architecture YouTube Channel
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Here are also some good book recommendations (links to Amazon pages), many you could probably find at a local library:
A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb by Philip Langdon
The Architecture of Community by Leon Krier
Architecture: Choice or Fate by Leon Krier
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch
The Smart Growth Manual by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck with Mike Lydon
Sprawl Repair Manual by Galina Tachieva
Retrofitting Suburbia by Ellen Dunham-Jones
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany
History of Urban Form Before the Industrial Revolutions by A.E.J. Morris
The Language of Towns & Cities: A Visual Dictionary by Dhiru A. Thadani