Taller buildings could be coming to an Oakland neighborhood along the rapid-transit line to San Francisco if the State Legislature approves a bill that would override local zoning restrictions.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times Legislation would allow more home building along transit routes to…

Zoom image will be displayed Giddings Plaza in Chicago was one of only 13 blocks among 46,311 in the city to possess every quality of a great main street. (Andrew Seaman / Flickr) A Sidewalk Talk Q&A with urban scholar Emily Talen on why these streets are vanishing — and what cities can do about it.…

One day, not long ago, I logged onto Strava and noticed a single, glaring comment posted beneath a recent ride: “It’s a beautiful day outside. Why are you riding Zwift?” I felt a twinge of shame. It had been a beautiful day. Instead of blue skies and the satisfying hum of rubber on tarmac, I was…

To anyone who has ever spent a torturous afternoon interacting with an outdated and poorly-designed government database, it comes as a sweet surprise that New York City’s new Zoning and Land Use Map is actually clear, intuitive, and easy to use. Beyond the detailed information on New York’s zoning…

By Sly James, Mayor of Kansas City, Missouri When I became Mayor of Kansas City in 2011, residents were eager to see local government become more efficient, accountable, and responsive to their needs.

A streetcar crosses an intersection in Portland, Oregon. | Visitor7 Debra Bruno is a freelance writer and editor. She is currently working on an e-book about her time in China, scheduled for publication by the Wall Street Journal. In the classic 1944 movie, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” Judy Garland…

HomeUrbanist NewsTechnologyCities Should Act More Like Amazon to Better Serve Their Citizens A new government "operating system" uses technology and user-oriented design to provide the utmost in effic

The garage, which is 53 percent occupied during peak parking hours, generates $2.3 million annually for the city. Under the plan, the transportation authority will retain ownership and negotiate a 65-

Zoom image will be displayed Copenhagen, Denmark (here, people gather at the Nyhavn waterfront) has unlocked value from better management of public lands and reinvested that money into transit infrastructure. (Maria Eklind / Flickr) A Sidewalk Talk Q&A with Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak, authors of…

I am usually quite conservative when it comes to how much time, data, and effort I am willing to put into a product from a new startup: too many go out of business or are acquired-and-sunset, and who wants to go to the effort twice? Dropbox, though, was something else entirely: the initial release…

The future of shared mobility in cities Citymapper 6 min read· Feb 22, 2018 -- Everything we’ve worked on has led to this. In Part 1 and 2, we wrote about the good and the bad about buses. Finally, here in Part 3, we’re proud to share our most significant innovation to date and the culmination of…

The term “smart city” is interesting yet not important, because nobody defines it. “Smart” is a snazzy political label used by a modern alliance of leftist urbanites and tech industrialists. To deem yourself “smart” is to make the NIMBYites and market-force people look stupid. Smart-city devotees…

It’s winter. The news of the world is hard to take. You may still be recovering from 2017. Seems like an ideal time to read. We recently put out the call to planners, architects, designers, developers, professors, technologists and others with a simple question: What’s your favorite book about…

Vivian Qu 10 min read· Feb 12, 2018 -- Photo by Park Troopers on Unsplash Privacy concerns are more common than ever. People are worried about how companies will gather and exploit their data. The outcome of this tracking ranges from relatively benign (“Amazon’s Next Big Business is Selling You”) to…

Kashmir In December, I converted my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a “smart home.” I connected as many of my appliances and belongings as I could to the internet: an Amazon Echo, my lights, my coffee maker, my baby monitor, my kid’s toys, my vacuum, my TV, my toothbrush, a photo frame,…

Revised February 19, 2018, based on excellent comments. We’ve all heard that the most important transportation innovation of the century is the smartphone. Who can doubt that apps for ride-hailing, navigation, and payment are making it easier to use shared transportation services, whether buses or…

Why do we even vote? Source: Flickr Voting, in its modern form, is only as old as the Enlightenment, which bubbled up in the late 1700s and gave birth to the liberal democracy, with the French and American Revolutions as its poster children. Prior to the Enlightenment, the dominant form of Western…

Welcome to Flatland, Kansas City PBS’ Nonprofit Newsroom, and your new home for CityScene KC content. Retired journalist and CityScene KC founder Kevin Collison generously donated the site’s content archive to Flatland. Learn more about Collison's contribution and explore more CityScene KC articles…

On the inside, the San Francisco Civic Center is one of the liveliest public spaces you’ll find. But the plaza outside is a place people move through quickly and there’s nary a chair or bench in sight.Credit...Peter DaSilva for The New York Times In the 1990s, San Francisco removed all of the…

In the weeks leading up to yesterday's big announcement that the city-building arm of Google parent company Alphabet—known as Sidewalk Labs—would be partnering with Waterfront Toronto on a new high-tech neighbourhood called Sidewalk Toronto, the news had become an open secret in development and…

I still write a blog! And I read blogs too: though many other medias have arrived and many already peaked and burned out, blogging is still a unique chance to read the writing of subject matter experts, written in an environment of near-total freedom, and on your own terms, using the RSS reader you…

A Framework for Building Cities of The Future Yury Lifshits 19 min read· Aug 3, 2016 -- The tech industry is outgrowing its main hub cities. In San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and London, rising rent and immigration limits force major corporations and investment funds to get serious about…

An attempt to build a font database with opentype.js Florian Schulz 12 min read· Oct 22, 2017 -- Even years after Avatar’s release, there’s one thing Ryan Gosling just can’t get over: the choice of the movie’s logo font “Papyrus”. In the parody produced by Saturday Night Live, the designer of the…

Kara Kotwas 5 min read· Oct 26, 2017 -- By Leo Shrayber , CEO Truck Trust It was a bright sunny Saturday in Miami when I received a phone call from Ron Argent, the CEO of London-Based Cognition Foundry, a customer and approved partner of IBM. “IBM is running an incubation program and this is the…

Shawnee Parks and Recreation want to make a walker's journey from one side of town to the other easier. "Our master plan for the whole park system calls for more trails and connectivity of existing trails,” said park planner Bill Riphahn. A $2.4 million grant from the Kansas Department of…

A continuous raster surface can also be used to illustrate the slope of Kansas City’s streets There’s a lot of innovation and progressive policy to celebrate in Kansas City, but my favorite is the Cit

If you've scored the new iPhone X , congrats. And if you haven’t managed to grab one yet, join the club. We don’t...(rushes to check the post)...have one yet either. But...that hasn't stopped our engineers from getting Citymapper ready - on Day One - for all of that screen. iPhone X = Citymapper in…

How government mortgage policy determined where you live Devon Marisa Zuegel 11 min read· Jul 31, 2017 -- The government exercises tremendous power over residential design in the US. Its influence is nearly invisible, because it works through complex financing programs, insurance incentives, and…

Session 1: Introduction September 23, 2024 CS 007 – Session 1 – IntroductionDownload Session 2: Behavioral Finance September 30, 2024 CS 007 – Session 2 – Predictably IrrationalDownload Session 3: Compensation October 7, 2024 CS 007 – Session 3 – CompensationDownload Session 4: Saving & Budgeting…

Geoffrey Hinton and Sara Sabour, holding a two-piece pyramid puzzle, are researching a system that could let computers see more like humans at a Google laboratory in Toronto.Credit...Christopher Wahl for The New York Times TORONTO — In 2012, Geoffrey Hinton changed the way machines see the world.…

Home A New City O/S Book A New City O/S The Power of Open, Collaborative, and Distributed Governance Stephen Goldsmith and Neil Kleiman • Foreword by Steve Case Release Date: November 28, 2017 Inside Look: Contents Chapter One 223 Pages Brookings Institution Press November 28, 2017 Paperback ISBN:…

Seattle’s chief traffic engineer is less concerned with how fast cars are getting through the city and more concerned with how people — on foot, on bike, in buses and cars — interact with the streets.

Congestion charging has averted what would likely have been a precipitous fall in London travel speeds over the past 15 years, according to my analysis of mode-share data from Transport for London, the government agency responsible for that city’s transport system. With a population equal to New…

PlacesForBikes is a PeopleForBikes program to help U.S. communities build better biking, faster. You can follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook or sign up for their weekly news digest about building all-ages biking networks. Several years from now, one of the country's best downtown bike…

Itineraries Airports Are Losing Money as Ride-Hailing Services Grow In response to a loss in revenue caused by ride-hailing services, some airports are trying to encourage people to drive and park. Bo

If you recently joined us thanks to Elon Musk, you may not know all about what I’m up to here. There’s an “about” page for that, and over at the right you’ll find links to my book and consulting firm But there’s also a lot of good material here that doesn’t go out of date. Start with the Basics…

Sam Gerstenzang 4 min read· Dec 31, 2017 -- 2017 ended up being a year of tremendous growth, after what I now realize was a year of terrifying stagnation. In 2017, I started a new company, moved to a new apartment, fell in love, started seeing a coach regularly (highly recommended), experienced…