Smartness

[owlectomy]

Today's book: How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken by Alex Marshall, which manages to articulate my frustrations about urban design and explain them in a clear and cogent manner that acknowledges the tradeoffs and advantages inherent in any style of urban planning.

Urbanism comes from a particular type of transportation system or systems. Grids of streets with a close network of stores and homes are produced by a transportation system where people rely on their feet to get around short distances, and on some type of mass transportation to go longer distances. Healthy urban neighborhoods are rare because these transportation systems have declined, and the economies designed around them have declined.

A couple dozen pages in, I'm not sure what solutions it offers that can be undertaken by people and not governments; aside from moving to Europe, that is...