Last week’s annual Norman Glickman lecture at the University of Pennsylvania featured the posthumously-published book by Eric Schneider, The Ecology of Homocide. Although covering only the period following World War II until the 1980s, Schneider’s study of murder in Philadelphia had a number of powerful connections with the present gun violence crisis in the city. … Continue reading The Ecology of Homicide Panel at Penn…
Cities
With Submissions to Amazon now in, What Have We learned about Our Region?
In a scramble not seen since the 1940s, when cities and towns across the country competed for the right to host the United Nations, hundreds of hopeful jurisdictions have put in their bids to host Amazon’s second headquarters. While oddsmakers are already projecting the favorites, it’s hard to predict what Amazon will do. It’s not … Continue reading With Submissions to Amazon now in, What Have We learned about Our Region?…
Richard Florida’s “Urban Crisis” is not Wrong: It Simply Lacks the Passion and Depth the Subject Demands
Fifteen years after The Rise of the Creative Class propelled him to a level of stardom among urbanists, Richard Florida’s latest book, The New Urban Crisis, has once again captured public attention. Had the presidential election ended differently in 2016, Florida’s prescriptions for dealing with both inequality and economic revitalization might have served as a … Continue reading Richard Florida’s “Urban Crisis” is not Wrong: It Simply Lacks the Passion and Depth the Subject Demands…
Trump Has Both Climate Change and Pittsburgh Wrong, but There’s Still a Challenge There
Even as newscasters were reporting Donald Trump’s determination to withdraw the US from compliance with the Paris climate accord with the pointed remark, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” a former Carnegie-Mellon professor, Richard Florida, was appearing on “The News Hour” explaining to Paul Solman the fundamentals of his new … Continue reading Trump Has Both Climate Change and Pittsburgh Wrong, but There’s Still a Challenge There…
Looking for a “School” Of New Jersey Urban Studies
Judging from the symposium hosted on the Princeton University campus May 1st, the question at hand—“Could there be a New Jersey school of urban studies?”—is both timely and still to be determined. Presentations covering a wide range of topics, from segregated school houses to oral histories of “queer” Newark, proved stimulating, if not always directly … Continue reading Looking for a “School” Of New Jersey Urban Studies…
Tapping “Legacy Assets” in Post-Industrial Cities
The Inquirer has published a smart essay today about the conversion of abandoned properties to new uses, what the University of Pennsylvania’s Mark Alan Hughes and Elise Harrington call “the arbitrage of legacy assets.” They cite the Philadelphia Navy Yard as a prime example of how tapping hidden value in underutilized or abandoned sites can … Continue reading Tapping “Legacy Assets” in Post-Industrial Cities…