Alissa Walker

The La Brea Tar Pits Remind Us That Los Angeles is an Ancient City

Conventional wisdom designates Los Angeles as a young, capricious metropolis—an underage drinker in the geopolitical nightclub—but it’s simply not true. L.A. is actually an ancient city, and the proof is bubbling right up to the surface at the La Brea Tar Pits, one of the richest paleontological sites in the world and the only one…

Start your week off right with these excellent stories from the urban world. This week: baseball economics, a ghastly smelling tour, Canadian sewers, radical policing tactics, and more. Why World Series tickets cost 81 percent more in Boston than they do in St. Louis. [Next City] “30 million people in the American West depend on…

Why the U.S. Government Needs a “Digital Core”

If you’ve been watching C-SPAN—and who hasn’t?—you’ll know the House Energy and Commerce Committee started hearings yesterday with the government contractors for HealthCare.gov, the maybe-not-quite-ready-for-prime-time website for the Affordable Care Act. Ostensibly, these hearings are a way for opponents to poke more holes in Obamacare, but it’s also a bleak reminder of the true role…

10 Secrets About L.A.’s Disney Hall on Its 10th Anniversary

Happy birthday, you old crumpled wave of steel, you! L.A.’s signature building opened to the public 10 years ago today, giving the city’s downtown a much-needed civic boost and cementing architect Frank Gehry’s status as a metal god. I wrote a story for this month’s Los Angeles Magazine about the building’s anniversary, and, in the…

Rich People, Booze, Rats, and Bikes: What’s Ruining Our Cities This Week

Crime! Cars! Lululemon! There’s always something trying to bring your neighborhood down, right? Each week, we’ll round up the stories about what exactly you think is ruining our cities. See a story we missed? Drop it in the comments. The color blue is ruining New York City “Mr. Bloomberg let Citibank alter the color palette…

Your Best City Ever! The Proliferation of Self-Help Urbanism

From 2011 to early 2013, the BMW Guggenheim Lab traveled to three cities—New York, Berlin, and Mumbai—holding workshops and events as part of a mobile “urban think tank.” The project outlined 100 trends facing each city—300 trends total—that the Lab’s organizers think will define the cities of the future. An exhibition of the findings, called…

How Encouraging People to Walk Can Help Strengthen Our Cities

I live in L.A., a land of 20-lane interchanges, parking lots the size of football stadiums, and mind-bending, soul-crushing, life-altering traffic. Every day, I meet people who don’t even know we have a public transit system and see places in my neighborhood without any sidewalks. This is because, a half-century ago, my city decided to…

A Secret Opera Erupts Inside California’s Biggest Train Depot

Headphones are part of daily life at train stations, an urban necessity used by commuters to drown out the flurry of action around them. But the other night at Union Station in Los Angeles, as I watched a woman crawl across the top of an information booth while a man’s voice from another room whispered…

Should New York City’s Next Mayor Appoint a Deputy Mayor of Design?

One of these days, Michael Bloomberg is not going to be mayor of New York City anymore, and someone else is going to be crowned King of the Great Underground River. Yesterday, that person got a to-do list from New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman. https://gizmodo.com/an-artificial-cave-200-beneath-central-park-with-micha-1446538828 Kimmelman’s list is very good, and he basically…

This Awesome App Helps You Add “Civic Bling” to Your Street

Bike lanes are cool and all, but haven’t you always thought that what your neighborhood really needs is some bedazzled water fountains? You can pimp your block with Blockee, a tool designed by several Code for America fellows. I used Blockee (above) to redesign a bridge in my neighborhood which local officials want to turn…

Tour 3 Unrealized Projects That Almost Gave Us A Very Different L.A.

It would appear that, as a country, we’re experiencing some serious regret (or relief?) in examining plans for our cities that never came to fruition. San Francisco looked at its Unbuilt SF, a similar show opened in Washington D.C.last year, and out here in L.A.—the land of broken promises and shattered dreams—there’s Never Built Los…

A Map of the Closest Pizza Place to Anywhere in the United States

It’s the question you likely ask yourself every weekend around 1:42 on Saturday morning: How long will it take for a pizza to reach my mouth? And, more importantly, who’s delivering it? Now you know. This excellent map shows the closest pizza chain within a 10-mile radius for every American. Now you’ll not only know…

How Seven Cities Designed Surprisingly Great Websites

The government has been shut down for over a week, as have plenty of federally funded websites. Which makes me appreciate a good civic website even more. I was able to find seven city sites that will make you feel good about government again. Maybe. What you probably think about municipal websites still likely holds…

Coke’s “Downtown in a Box” Delivers Clean Water and Wi-Fi to Africa

Coca-Cola’s global distribution channels are so well-developed that a Coke can get pretty much anywhere on the planet—even places where there’s no access to fresh water. But Coke is working on that, too. As part of its mission to bring drinking water to the communities it serves, the company has developed a solar-powered, Wi-Fi-equipped kiosk…

Could GM’s Tiny Self-Driving Smartcar Actually Revolutionize Cities?

The city of the future is going to be “crowded, dirty, and resource-constrained,” said Stephen J. Girsky, a vice president of GM, at CityLab, an event in Battery Park City earlier today. And that means everyone’s gonna want one of GM’s new Electric Networked Vehicles, or EN-V. According to Girsky, GM’s vision of the zero-emission,…

When Will Airbnb Decide What Kind of Company It Wants to Be?

In 2007, I got an email from San Francisco. A big industrial design conference was coming to town and Bay Area hotels were predictably overbooked and overpriced. Two designers wanted to help their friends find affordable, un-scary places to stay, so they started a website called AirBed & Breakfast. The two designers were Joe Gebbia…

Tour the Art Train That Traveled from New York to Oakland

Last week a train twinkling with LED lights chugged into Oakland’s 16th Street Station, its final destination on a 3,000 mile, ten-city whistle stop art happening orchestrated by Doug Aitken called Station to Station. You can peruse the project’s website for documentation of some of the cross-country installations and performances, which range from a kinetic…

How Tom Clancy’s Techno-Thrillers Helped Us Understand Modern Warfare

In the days after 9/11, as the media tried to assume some kind of normalcy, I remember watching talk shows attempt to dissect the week’s unbelievable events. And I remember one guest who kept popping up night after night: Novelist Tom Clancy, who died Tuesday at 66. Clancy was a darling of CNN and Charlie…

Corita Kent: How a Screenprinting Nun Changed the Course of Modern Art

During the 1960s, a woman named Corita Kent transformed a tiny art department in a Hollywood Catholic school into a global center for design and printmaking. She was buddies with Buckminister Fuller and counted IBM as a client. Oh yeah, and she was a nun! The new book Someday is Now: The Art of Sister…

Facebook Is Building Its Own “Resort-Inspired” Factory Town

Facebook is dipping its big blue thumb into the real estate market, investing in a cushy 394-unit apartment complex that’s a 45-minute walk to its new Frank Gehry-designed Menlo Park campus. The $120 million Anton Menlo will be designed by architects at KTGY Group in a partnership with St. Anton Developers (hence the name) and…