this guy Ben Fox has put together a new way to promote Books or find good ones. He has asked Authors to say what they like. And he flattered me by asking me to name my favorite Urban planning books. Here is what I put together.
Yes, I have my own newsletter now. Check it out here.
Here’s my latest column from Governing Magazine, where I opine about the links, if any, between the form of our buildings and the form of our government, and whether white columns mean anything at all.
I have in my hands an interesting new book by the photographer Stanley Greenberg, Codex New York: Typologies of The City. In it, Greenberg goes around and takes pictures of largely less-examined parts of Manhattan. What we are really seeing is how Greenberg classifies and slices and dices these spaces in his mind. He separates them into “Alleys,” “Bridge/Tunnel/Track,” “Buttresses,” “Cemeteries,” “Construction,” “Gas/Electric,” “Geology/Topography,’ “Grid/Non-Grid,” “Little Streets,” “Parking Lots,” “Parking Sheds,” “Playgrounds,” “Relics,” “Sanitation,” “Skybridges,” “Vacant Spaces,” “Wastewater Treatment,” “Water Supply,” and “Waterfront.”
My reaction to the book is a good example of how information shapes seeing. I didn’t like or understand the book, until I read the Table of Contents and saw how Greenberg has separated the photographs into these sections. Once armed mentally with the classification system, it all became very interesting, and amusing. Who would ever think of noticing and photographing Parking Sheds. “Buttresses” was one of my favorite sections. It turns out there are numerous buildings supported by steel buttresses, in an ad hoc way, to keep them from falling down. I had not noticed that. So it’s a good book. The introductory Essay by Karrie Jacobs is also nice. As usual, she is readable and insightful. She argues that we are all staring at our screens more, and the city around us less. I don’t quite buy the argument that this somehow lets the city change in unexpected or unwanted ways, but it’s an interesting theory. Oh yeah: the word “Palimpsest” does not occur in the book, as far as I noted. But it could.
Here’s an interesting column of mine, if I do say so myself, about using public places and functions in unanticipated, and usually good, ways. It’s riding the subway just to read a book, it’s all sorts of things and types of behavior.
Here’s my latest column for Governing, where I look into how street-level retail will compete against, or complement, the online world.
Here’s the text of an essay I wrote wow, 26 years ago. I’m putting it here, because it’s hard to access online. Although here is a link, that may or may not work in the future.
PARIS – TO UNDERSTAND a city, to know a city, you need to unlock its secrets. Finding the key takes time. Sometimes it means walking for months, looking for the small street that leads to the corner where the old men play dominoes at a sidewalk table.
I didn’t have months. In Paris, I just had five weeks. Before I left, I searched for a book that would open Paris’ door. A regular guidebook wouldn’t do; I tried a novel, a memoir, with no real luck. Before I boarded the plane in Washington, D.C., I bought a new paperback with a gold cover. “Paris Dreambook – An Unconventional Guide to the Splendor and Squalor of the City” was less of a guide than a series of fantastical essays about the author’s life in Paris, told through a character called “the peasant.”The author was Lawrence Osborne. He was pictured inside, a thin, lean, unsmiling young man standing against a grafitti-covered wall.After reading a few chapters, I figured Osborne had made most of the stuff up. He led me on a dark journey through Paris’ neo-hip art and literary worlds, its brothels and Arabian bath house, its gastronomical obsessions and its tiny ignored neighborhoods. He used people he had met and his own imagination as entry points. He wrote in half-page, run-on sentences.It wasn’t long before I became obsessed with the book. I started running down Osborne’s tales. I even went to his apartment building, whose occupants and appearance he describes in loving detail.The building was on a small, bumpy narrow street that twisted its way down a hill from a small plaza and church at the Place des Abbesses. Above the doorway to the otherwise plain building was a statue of a reclining nude woman.Osborne had departed a year or so back. But the concierge was there, the same one he had devoted a whole chapter to. Osborne described the man as a mixture of magician, master chef, knife fighter and enlightened Buddha:“On the ground floor, safely withdrawn from the world when it suits his purposes behind a curtain of red and yellow beads behind his door, there is a laxer follower of the true path, a Tanzanian Ali, concierge to the building, whose hidden identity, for those who wish to probe his mysteries, is Aladdin. This can easily be confirmed by entering his single room tucked under the stairs, in the middle of which, amid the paraphernalia of many assumed lives, Arabic dictionaries of medicinal spells, hi-fi equipment, boxes of rabbits’ feet, cabinets of tropical oils and herbs, cooking pots scented with clove oil, pots of lemon grass and cardamom pods, dense clothes racks and various firearms, hangs a a khaki regulation tropics British army uniform decorated with coloured bands.”Ali, a small, elderly man in an Arabian-style cap and shirt, greeted me at the iron outer door. He had an unflinching solemnness about him as he inquired about my motives for being there.Amazingly, Ali did not know about Osborne’s book or that he was in it. About six months earlier, he said, another young man, another journalist it seemed, had come searching for Osborne. That man had said something about a book, too.Soon I was squeezed inside Ali’s tiny room, reading him the entire chapter. His room was just as Osborne described: a miniscule cubicle neatly crammed full of books, records and knickknacks with a tiny kitchen at one corner. Over small cups of strong coffee, Ali confirmed Osborne’s tales and added a few more.Yes, he had served in the British army during World War II and been decorated for bravery. The medal-studded uniform hung by the bed, just as Osborne described.Yes, he had been in prison a few years in Zanzibar. He had been a police inspector in the government but was caught on the wrong side of a coup d’etat.Yes, he did dabble a little in black magic. He had shown Osborne a few spells, but he didn’t like to talk about that.Yes, he had appeared in a few pornographic movies in Athens in his early ’50s. He had played a Nubian slave, just as Osborne said, who made love to an elegant mistress. Would I like to see the film?Yes, he had been involved in a few scrapes with intruders. He showed a gray knife scar on his belly.This little man in this tiny room had probably led a fuller life than I ever would, full of the rich adventures that satiate the soul. Ali, though, also seemed a little lonely. He jumped at the chance to talk. He showed me pictures of his nine children and of a fleshy young woman hugging him on the beach.“How do you say it in English?” he asked. “She is my concubine.”Ali was about 70 percent flattered and 30 percent annoyed about appearing in the book. Osborne had never mentioned the project.“He was such a nice boy,” Ali said. “Very quiet. We would eat together often. He would ask me questions and write in a notebook. But I never dreamed he was writing a book.”He was sad that he didn’t have a picture of Osborne. Could I get one for him? Or his address?I said I would try. It was past midnight when I left the building and walked down the narrow, twisted street back to my rented room in what now seemed a plainer, and less exotic quarter of Paris.
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It’s pretty neat that my first book, How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken, published in 2000 by University of Texas Press, is now out in Chinese translation. The rights were bought about a year ago and now the Chinese edition is out. Looks very nice. I confess I may like the cover better than the original. How about those little birds flying up! I didn’t notice them initially. 
There’s too much potential in moving a lot of people to where they want to go not to bring back many of the now abandoned or semi-abandoned train lines in this country. That’s what I say in this latest Governing column, which starts with the effort in Great Barrington in Western Massachusetts.
Folks in and around Great Barrington in the Berkshires in Massachusetts are working to revive the once direct train service to New York City. I was invited to speak up there, and so I did, and gave a talk about how transportation shapes place. The founder of the movement wrote a nice summary of my talk, which I put a link to here.