Categories
Urbanism

Community-Blindness

Developers build houses and call them “homes.” They build socially sterile subdivisions and call them “communities.” It’s called “warming the product.” It’s also happening with alleged third places. Officials of a popular coffeehouse chain often claim that their establishments are third places, but they aren’t. Roy Oldenburg, Introduction to Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About the […]

Categories
Fiction

Lights Up, Bitches

This is a work of fiction. It was given Honorable Mention for the As Seen On [] writing contest for Urban Omnibus in 2016. I am the meanest mother in Kings. Other Method Man, they call me. But even that’s a short sell, because I don’t just De Niro that shit. I make it real. […]

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Non-fiction Urbanism

Reverse Commute – A Prospectus

Public works, writ large, are manifestations of modern democracy. If towns and cities are artificial organisms built on human cooperation and consensus more than anything, then the transit networks, parks, and utilities are vital organs that likewise require cooperative maintenance and attention. A wastewater treatment plant, for example, is not a plug-and-play automaton– it works […]

Categories
Fiction

RiskBands

This is a work of fiction. This article was retrieved from the (pre)archives of Forward Health Quarterly Review, Issue 31, October 2032. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Anaya v. Lacey decision eleven months prior, all articles authored by algorithms are no longer considered intellectual property and must therefore be made available to the public prior […]

Categories
Architecture

105 Montague Street Local Law 97 Report

I live in a 120-year-old, 8-floor, 25-unit, brick-and-wood-framed apartment building in Brooklyn Heights. The first thing that crossed my mind circa 2018 was that the building will be hit by the new Local Law 97 passed in by City Council in 2015 as part of the ambitious Climate Mobilization Act. Beyond the intent of the […]

Categories
Fiction

A Morning with Galen

This is a work of fiction. We sit across from each other. It’s an obtuse but intimate angle, bisecting the corner of the table so that my knees touch her dangling toes, and our faces are both within grabbing radius of the other’s arms. I realize the position is reserved only for these situations, third […]

Categories
Architecture Books

101 Things I Didn’t Learn In Architecture School

The longer I practice architecture, the more I learn about what I do not know. Particularly stinging are the “unknown unknowns” as a U.S. Secretary of Defense might call them. For architects, “known unknowns” might include specialized knowledge within categories that we were introduced to in school but never had time to dig into. For […]

Categories
Architecture Data Analysis Urbanism

Disaster Preparedness (excerpt)

Below is an excerpt from the introductory section of a white paper I am developing. Human society in the 21st century will be impacted by global forces such as pandemics, climate change-driven weather events, and geopolitical conflict. As witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, governments could improve their “disaster preparedness” particularly by assessing and utilizing existing […]

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Uncategorized

Are Movies Getting Longer?

Do you ever find yourself sitting through yet another big-studio blockbuster, wondering when it’s going to end? I have been feeling this feeling a lot lately. Is the 2+ hour running time a standard since movies immemorial, or have they been slowly getting longer? Naturally, I had to do some data analysis to find out. […]

Categories
Urbanism

Urban-Rural Legends

I. The Myth It goes back before COVID forced city dwellers to seek greener pastures. It goes back before white flight. It goes back to the founding of the United States, and the ideological struggle at its heart. It even goes as far back as the evolution of man, from hunter to farmer. It’s a […]