Alissa Walker

An emerging maker culture building Cincinnati, a “Green Line” making a Mexican city healthier, and a car-free festival changing L.A.—all that, plus preserving post offices in an age of email and three plans to save San Francisco from a housing crisis, in this week’s Urban Reads. “In America, nearly every city and town has, or…

Techbrats and Tech Buses: What’s Ruining San Francisco This Week

It’s been a tumultuous week in San Francisco. The city’s transit agency held hearings to regulate the ubiquitous tech buses, but protesters say the buses have already ruined the city’s real estate. It’s a What’s Ruining Our Cities San Francisco Special Edition. Tech buses are ruining affordable housing On Tuesday, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation…

Where Homelessness Is Getting Worse (It’s Not the Places You’d Think)

Overall, homelessness seems to be on the decline in the U.S. Since 2007, the rate of homelessness for all Americans declined nine percent; however, for about half of the states in the country, homelessness is still getting worse. ThinkProgress compared datasets from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2008 and 2013 to see…

The World’s Wackiest Monuments, Chosen By You

When we asked you last week to send us the weirdest monuments in your neighborhood, you not only delivered, you quite frankly freaked us out. How do you people sleep at night knowing that a giant turtle-humping statue is just down the street? https://gizmodo.com/whats-the-coolest-weirdest-or-most-overlooked-monumen-1500500337 Thanks to your hard work, here are just a few of…

Being on a Smartphone Makes You More Likely to Use Public Spaces—Kinda

In the 1960s, a sociologist named William H. Whyte revealed something interesting about the behavior of people in parks and plazas across the U.S.: people liked being with people. But has that changed now that everyone carries a tiny computer in their hands? According to a new study: no. Throughout the 60s and 70s, Whyte’s…

How Do We De-Suburbanize the Suburbs?

Phoenix, Arizona, is a famously fast-growing city. But, instead of growing up, the city has almost uniformly grown out, with terracotta-tiled subdivisions consuming the adjacent desert at a frightening rate: some estimates claim its suburbs grew an acre per hour during the early 2000s housing boom. A story on Marketplace discusses how Phoenix has been…

Martin Luther King’s 1956 tips for riding integrated buses, examining how design has helped an Alabama county, building instant cities in Accra and instant skyscrapers in Mumbai, and how two New York architects are tearing down the work of their former friends. It’s all this week in our favorite Urban Reads. “Do not deliberately sit…

What’s the Coolest, Weirdest or Most Overlooked Monument in Your City?

Last week, the New York Times produced a beautiful feature that serves as a monument to monuments, of sorts, highlighting the often-forgotten statues, plaques, pillars and benches that mark Important Sports and Important People across New York City. The story plucks 10 lesser-known monuments for recognition, like the Lithuanian Flyers Memorial in, yes, Lithuanian Square,…

Starchitects, Bridges, Drought: What’s Ruining Our Cities This Week

Starchitects don’t build ’em like they used to—and now one’s getting sued for it. Chris Christie remains in troubled waters over a bridge. And if you thought the Polar Vortex was bad, how about the looming Emergency Drought? It’s all this week in What’s Ruining Our Cities. Starchitecture is ruining Valencia, Spain The City of…

What Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Breakup Means for the Future of Type Design

Chances are you’ve looked at the work of Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones at least one time today. The type designers are behind many of the world’s most-loved fonts, like Gotham, made famous by Obama’s 2008 campaign. But according to a nasty legal document making the rounds today, the duo has parted ways. http://gawker.com/font-gods-hoefler-frere-jones-split-in-nasty-corporat-1503534833 As…

Stage An Oscar-Winning Drama On Your Own Personal Bombed-Out Movie Set

It may not look like much right now, but this strip of blown-out, busted-up buildings is usually swarming with celebrities. Movies like Zero Dark Thirty, Iron Man and National Security were all filmed here, at what’s known as the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch, a series of sets scattered out across 100 acres just north of…

Impressive images of the California wildfire

Just two weeks after state officials declared 2013 the driest year in California history, a fast-moving wildfire has burned 1,700 acres northeast of Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Times. In winter. When it’s usually raining. As of 10:00 a.m. this morning the Colby Fire is zero percent contained in Glendora, California, a city…

Evangelical Urbanism: A Review of the Downtown Project’s Vegas Revival

As the story goes, Las Vegas was built by Mormons and mobsters. This unlikely team worked together to bring gambling to a place almost exclusively populated by men constructing the Hoover Dam. Their work turned a tiny sun-baked town into a global phenomenon. As the other story goes, downtown Vegas is not a once-glorious place…

Meeting Tony Hsieh, the Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas

I’m not gonna lie: It’s a lot like meeting Oz in his Emerald City. Mostly because no one associated with him would set up a formal time for me to meet with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos and the financial and philosophical force behind the Downtown Project, the $350 million urban revitalization program transforming downtown…

Portland celebrates another safe year for cyclists, Hamburg goes car-free, San Francisco rents its curbs to tech buses, Houston’s got some wacky architecture, and L.A. is the city of the future—or a city in decline? It’s all in this week’s Urban Reads. In 2013, the city of Portland, Oregon, reported zero bike fatalities—again. They also…

Build For Locals and Tourists Will Come: Vegas’s Plan for Its Downtown

Between the Downtown Project’s area and the Arts District is the new Las Vegas City Hall, a gleaming mirage of a building surrounded by a forest of photovoltaics. This is where the city leadership moved after it leased its old City Hall to Tony Hsieh’s company Zappos—a move that you can’t help but imbue with…

Another Vegas Neighborhood In Transition: Looking at the Arts District

About 1.5 miles southwest of the Downtown Project’s cluster of development in Las Vegas is another creative neighborhood going through changes. It’s named 18b. Depending on who you talk to, that stands for the size of the area (“18 blocks”) or the number of the land parcel. But pretty much everyone just calls it the…

A Map of the Futuristic Los Angeles Subway From Spike Jonze’s Her

One of the best moments in the new movie Her is watching Joaquin Phoenix ride an elevated train through a Los Angeles of the near-future, dance through a bustling subway station, and emerge at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. The scene got a surprised laugh from everyone at the screening I attended. After years…

Are Other Vegas Businesses Benefiting from the Downtown Project?

The oldest freestanding bar in Vegas is Atomic Liquors, built in 1952, back when you could climb onto the roof and watch atomic bombs explode at desert test sites 60 miles away. If you sit long enough at its expansive bar, chances are Kent Johns will pull up a stool next to you and tell…

How the Downtown Project Is Solving Vegas’s Urban Problems In-House

When I meet Josh Westerhold at the offices of Project 100, the Las Vegas urban mobility startup that’s funded by the Downtown Project, we decide it would probably make sense to head out into downtown Vegas to tour their project area in person. From the other room, his co-worker has an even better idea: “Take…