Archive
Browse all 6 articles across governance, urban systems, ecologies, and latitudes.
Medellín''s Miracle? Urban Design, Politics, and the Limits of Transformation
Once suffering extraordinarily high violence rates, Medellín remade itself through transit, public libraries, and public-space investments. This essay traces the politics, innovations, ambivalences, and lessons for U.S. cities seeking equitable urban transformation.
Zoning as Destiny: How Regulation Shapes American Cities
America's housing crisis, racial segregation, and climate challenges share a common origin: zoning laws written a century ago to exclude and divide.
The Neighborhoods That Burn First: How Heat Islands Map Inequality
Cities are becoming furnaces. This essay traces how design, policy, and inequality create urban heat islands and proposes pragmatic, equity‑first interventions—shade, water, surface albedo, zoning reform, and community stewardship—to cool the most vulnerable neighborhoods.
Stranded: Who Gets to Move
Public transportation is social infrastructure. How we design and fund it determines who can access jobs, education, and opportunity.
Colonial Urbanism Solved Climate. We Forgot.
American cities keep patching problems with the wrong tools: we use 1926 style zoning to fight a 2025 climate, and we wonder why the patient keeps sweating. When in doubt, open the drawer with the old instructions. In 1573, a Spanish royal decree—the Ordinances for the Discovery, New Settlements.
The Great Unbuilding: How tearing out the wrong highways can stitch a republic back together
Stand beneath the I-10 over Claiborne in Tremé and listen: the concrete hums like a bad memory. A neighborhood that once gathered under live oaks now measures shade in rebar geometry. We inherited miles of this: structures poured in the name of 'mobility' that severed streets, businesses, lungs—and.