Some articles on urban planning

As a subscriber to The Atlantic, I can read articles from 1857 to the present. It’s fascinating to read how people understood/discussed topics over these 160+ years.

Here are a few that I found searching for “urban planning” (I used my normal tools to make them accessible to you without hitting their paywall.)

• 1909: The German way of making better (affordable) cities.
• 1914: A fascinating look at planned communities… and the economics (totally sound today) of providing public goods in a “private co-op” (a club).
• 1938: Parked cars are ruining cities for people walking or using transit. (The solution — “minimum parking requirements” — caused its own issues; see 2021 below.)
• 1945: Robert Moses lambasts those who get in the way of replacing slums with “broad highways lined with landscaping and recreation facilities, open to the sun and the elements.” He does make SOME space for the people living there… in theory.
• 1950: Robert Moses opposes “ugly” suburbs.
• 1952: Cities need to protect themselves against suburbs that syphon off their residents (tax revenues) — Detroit foreshadowed… but also a cliché claim that zoning is a good for cities (as opposed to cars).
• 1958: Downtown is for people <== the essay that launched Jane Jacobs
• 1960: This essay on the potential of urban trains foreshadows what did not happen and predicts what did — trains carrying freight over long distances.
• 1962: Robert Moses defends his pro-car, neighborhood bulldozing.
• 1963: Political failures harm Washington DC’s Black residents.
• 1965: An ecologist on the (strong, negative) impacts of cars on cities.
• 1966: Not far from Jane Jacobs neighbourhood: NYC officials ignore residents’ ideas for improvements as they impose plans that will help (richer) outsiders.
• 1972: America is using oil too quickly, so Americans need to drive fewer, more efficient cars. (That didn’t happen!)
• 1984: Jane Jacobs on how cities create “the wealth of nations” [pdf] — she wrote this as an excerpt to a new (then) book, but it echoes her thoughts in her 1969 Economy of Cities. (I wasn’t as interested in Part 2 — “the dynamics of decline” — because it boils down to taxing cities to death.)
• 2000: “Quality of community life isn’t going to improve unless new communities that are built have centers and edges and offer the ability to enjoy life as a pedestrian“
• 2006: Chain stores are actually pretty good for smaller communities.
• 2007: A look back on Moses, the “Godfather of sprawl” (see 1950, above)
• 2009: Population density (thus interactions) spurs development.
• 2010: Good vs bad gentrification.
• 2010: Did Jane Jacobs freeze a neighborhood in nostalgia?
  

  Thanks to the profound influence that The Death and Life of Great American Cities has exerted, the West Village circa 1960 has come to epitomize—really to be the blueprint for—the urban good life. But in its mix of the new and the left over, in its alchemy of authenticity, grit, seedy glamour, and intellectual and cultural sophistication, this was a neighborhood in a transitional and unsustainable, if golden, moment. Which meant that it was about to lose its soul.

• 2015: Robert Moses’s 1962 self-defense (see above) was not entirely wrong, in terms of the need to build ahead of growth.
• 2015: New Orleans needs to respect its water if it’s going to endure — and more insights from the Dutch.
• 2016: Computer games that simulate urban planning are misleading and full of car-based assumptions, but they also can’t help but to hide the reality of the massive amount of space dedicated to parking.
• 2016: The making of Jane Jacobs.
• 2016: Zoning leads to segregation.
• 2018: City noise is making you sick (especially if you’re poor)
• 2021: Minimal parking requirements increase housing costs.
• 2021: Progressives don’t understand gentrification.
• 2024: It’s time to replace (car friendly) zoning and cul-de-sacs with (people friendly) mixed-use, gridded streets, to recover from “cities that are unaffordable, stagnant, segregated, and sprawling.“
• Last week (!): The world is in a city-building boom (many will fail, some will succeed, none will “fix” older cities with problems…)

If you have good articles to read, then please leave links in the comments!