Cities

Beauty In My BackyardUgly architecture stops homes getting built.How Amsterdam invented the fire departmentTwo Dutch brothers invented a system that transformed a city previously ravaged by firesWhy the West stopped making landLarge swaths of America’s cities were originally underwater. We stopped half a century ago, but there is plenty more land left to take.Should European housing politics be Americanized?Europe’s housing shortages are even worse than America’s. So why does nobody there talk about zoning?How the Squamish struck gold in VancouverJust beyond central Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is building one of the most ambitious and unusual housing developments in the world, and getting rich in the process. How they did it has lessons for the whole world.Samurai cityFor three hundred years, Japan enjoyed enviable stability and peace. All it took was locking up its warlike samurai elite in the world’s least efficient city.Washington diaryWhat Americans take to be a borrowed European tradition turns out to be a national style all of their own.Triumph of the Spanish cityThe traditional European apartment city has declined almost everywhere. There is one big exception.The invention of busesWheeled vehicles existed for 5,000 years before someone thought of running a bus service.Why Japan has such good railwaysJapan’s railways are the finest in the world. Other countries can copy its formula.Escaping the Ogallala trapThere is a closing window to stop driverless cars from creating omnigridlock.The NIMBY problemNot all NIMBYs are alike. Dividing the most unreasonable ones from the rest might be the key to getting homes built.The dysfunctional tigerHong Kong has land to build on, an autocratic government, and the world’s most expensive housing. Why doesn’t it build more?Urban expansion in the age of liberalismMany Victorian cities grew by tenfold in a century. Could ours ever do the same?Fixing retail with land value captureHow to create beautiful shopping streets everywhere.The gold plating of American waterClean drinking water is a modern miracle. But it has become expensive, and it doesn’t need to be.The United States needs fewer bus stopsBus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective. It can turn a service people tolerate into one they’re happy to use.Cheap ornament and status gamesWas modernism originally a way to signal taste instead of wealth?The Great DownzoningIt was once legal to build almost anything, everywhere. Then, in the space of a few decades, nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. What happened?The developing world needs more roadsThe cities of the developing world could be its growth engine if their streets were not so gridlocked. The solution is laying out wider roads.Turning trains into tramsTrains often stop at the edge of town centres, forcing inconvenient transfers. Running railway lines onto tram networks provides a solution.The merits of unified ownershipWhy do some neighborhoods get garden squares and graceful streets, while others don’t? The answer isn’t zoning or taste, it’s who owns the land, and how unified that ownership is.Toronto’s underground labyrinthPedestrian tunnels are often thought to undermine urban life. The opposite happened in Toronto.How to redraw a cityJapan faced some of the world’s toughest planning problems. It solved them by letting homeowners replan whole neighborhoods privately by supermajority vote.The magic of through runningCommuter trains often stop at the edge of cities. Short tunnels can link them up, creating metro networks for a fraction of the cost of building them from scratch.The failure of the land value taxLand value taxes are once again becoming a popular all-purpose solution to housing issues. But implementing them in early 1900s Britain destroyed the then-dominant Liberal Party.Steam networksNew York’s skyscrapers soar above a century-old steam network that still warms the city. While the rest of the world moved to hot water, Manhattanites still buy steam by the megapound.Chinese towers and American blocksChina builds towers in a park, while America, and nearly everyone else, builds squat mid-rise blocks. The difference comes down to regulation, not culture.Why housing shortages cause homelessnessWhy do high-cost cities have more homelessness? It’s not just about rents — it’s also about the rooms friends and family can’t afford to share. How Madrid built its metro cheaplyMadrid tripled the length of its metro system in just 12 years — faster and cheaper than almost any other city in the world. What can its expansion teach other cities?Machines for living inBuildings are not just art – they are the places people live in, work in, and experience every day. True functionalism combines utility and beauty for the people who use it most.New York’s long road to congestion pricingIt has taken almost 60 years to bring traffic congestion pricing to New York. This is the story of how politicians and advocates built the coalition it needed to finally happen.Britain’s forgotten financial crisisBritain had its fastest ever house price growth not in the 2020s but in the 1970s. Houses then were also getting smaller and worse. The problem was a lack of supply.Gentrification as a housing problemGentrification can be a real problem for people it pushes out. But the root cause is inflexible housing supply, and solutions that don’t tackle that can make the problem worse.The beauty of concreteWhy are buildings today simple and austere, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor.How Israel turned homeowners into YIMBYsHomeowners are often the biggest opponents of building new homes. An Israeli reform reversed this by making homeowners the main beneficiaries of development. Why we stopped building cut and coverWe used to dig up roads to put trains underneath – cheaply. Ever-better tunnel boring machines have made the disruption this causes unnecessary.Upzoning New ZealandNew Zealand passed the most ambitious upzoning reforms in the world. Now comes the backlash.Making architecture easyUnlike nearly all other arts, architecture is inherently public and shared. That means that buildings should be designed to be agreeable – easy to like – not to be unpopular works of genius.Growing the growth coalitionLocal government faces incentives just like everything else. If we want voters to encourage growth near them, we need to make it worth their while.Houston, we have a solutionHouston was notorious for its sprawl. But it has seen a gentle density revolution since the 1990s. Allowing neighborhoods to opt out of citywide reforms was crucial in its transformation.Why Britain doesn’t buildThe history of attempts to reform planning in Britain is proof that political willpower is not enough: you need to be smart, not just brave.How DC densifiedWashington, DC, has avoided the worst price rises that have plagued many other growing American cities. Arlington’s transit-oriented development might be the reason.Gentle DensitySamuel Hughes, a contributing editor at Works in Progress, visits cities around to learn about gentle density.Building back fasterBuilding infrastructure doesn’t need to come at the cost of the environment. But it does need smarter rules.Plastic roadsPlastic is eating the roads. It might be a cleaner, quieter, ready-made alternative to asphalt for the next generation of paving.Reclaiming the roadsUntil recently, roads were shared between a messy mix of cyclists, stagecoaches, carts, horses, and pedestrians, with no dominant user. London’s lost ringwaysA monstrous plan to build major motorways through some of London’s greatest neighborhoods fell apart. But the price was the birth of the NIMBY movement, and a permanent ceiling on Britain’s infrastructure ambitions.Why Ireland’s housing bubble burstIreland’s housing bubble and bust has become emblematic of what not to do in housing debates around the world. The only problem is nobody agrees what actually went wrong.Why skyscrapers are so shortThe height of skyscrapers is limited by physical, economic and regulatory barriers, but we should want to overcome them and build taller. Here’s how we can do it.Against the survival of the prettiestMany modern buildings put up today seem uglier than traditional ones around them. Some say this is because we’ve torn down the ugly old buildings, and only see the survivors. Are they right?The housing theory of everythingWestern housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.Burying the leadResearchers have known for decades that lead poisoning damages brains and worsens crime, but millions of Americans still drink contaminated water every day. Here’s how we can fix that.Why tech cannot escape expensive housingAs rental prices continue to climb in San Francisco, tech firms have looked to relocate in other cities. Without major housing reforms, the next Silicon Valley will face the same fate.A place in the sunWhile rents have been soaring for years in urban areas around the world, one Australian city has weathered the storm. What can the world learn from the experiences of Sydney?In praise of pasticheBuilding traditionalist architecture today is derided as inauthentic pastiche. But this perspective turns a blind eye to the dramatic and sophisticated ways that design has been applied throughout history.Clusters rule everything around meSome of the greatest advances in technology have emerged from bringing intelligent people together to solve problems. How do tech clusters develop & how can we use them to replicate past successes?Build state capacity by building charter citiesMany low-income countries are unable to provide effective governance for their citizens, trapped in a cycle of slow growth and persistent corruption. Charter cities may provide an answer.