urban planning

Turning On Light Bulbs, Dialing Back Climate Change, and Building Up Cities

Edison: And the Rise of Innovation by Leonard DeGraaf (Foreword by Bill Gates)

The nutshell: This heavily illustrated biography of Thomas Edison from DeGraaf, the archivist at Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey, creates a portrait not of a mad genius but of a brilliant, ambitious, and collaborative inventor and businessman with a knack for knowing what the public wanted.

Literary lovechild of: Randall E. Stross’ The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World and Henry Ford’s My Life and Work.

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LADOT Bike Coordinator Nate Baird

Confessions of a Wannabe Clairvoyant

Nate Baird is the bicycle program coordinator of the LADOT Bike Program. Before participating in a panel on bicycle-car relations in Southern California, he talked mind-reading, swimming, and biking by …

City Planner James Rojas

A Fan of Japanese Noodles, Mick Jagger, and Street Vending

City planner James Rojas, founder of the Latino Urban Forum, writes and lectures about how the American front yard and landscape are being transformed by changing tastes, changing values, and …

Life Under Our Despotic Edifice-Drawing Overlords

Do Architects Have Too Much Say Over How We Live?

If you’ve seen neighborhoods razed and replaced by entirely new sorts of structures, you might think it’s all a bit heavy-handed. And one of the key visionaries behind the effort …

What Will Post-Immigrant Los Angeles Be Like?

Assessing the Future of a City That’s Becoming Increasingly Native-Born

by Sarah Rothbard |

Los Angeles is a city increasingly made up of native-born residents and fewer and fewer immigrants. Occidental College cultural critic and historian Thaddeus Russell opened a conversation on L.A.’s post-immigrant …

Urban Planner Deirdre Pfeiffer

The Happy Commuter

Deirdre Pfeiffer is an assistant professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University, where she studies the effects of housing planning and policies on …


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