Category: Book Review
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How to Kill a City
Book Review In cities across America we are seeing the negative effects of gentrification and how it has the potential to destroy culture, heritage, and displace long time residents. People are being priced out of homes, forced to “drive until they qualify.” This phenomenon may seem relegated to high population centers like New York City…
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Mega Tech: Technology in 2050
Book Review Bullets that can move around objects in air, self driving vehicles, drones filling the sky, a neural interface connecting your mind with the internet, and farm equipment that can be sent out to work your field while you are on vacation. These all seem like ideas from a fiction novel, but many of them…
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Design with Nature
Book Review Cities all across the world are realizing their mistake in covering up natural features to construct bigger and better communities. After decades of building over rivers and streams, dredging wetlands for lakes, and sprawling across prime agricultural land, we are finally seeing the devastating impacts. The solutions to these problems are already being…
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Evicted
Book Review As a city planner working with a rental licensing program I found Evicted by Matthew Desmond to be an eye opening and insightful book on the life of both renters and landlords. Desmond tells the story of the rental climate of Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009, just after the housing market collapsed and rents soared…
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Genius of the European Square
Book Review Imagine yourself seated on a patio overlooking a large public square. You are enjoying evening drinks with some friends before you run a few errands on the plaza on your way home for the evening. While you are seated, an old acquaintance happens by on their way to pick up a few groceries.…
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If You Want to Write
Book Review As a result of a recent preservation battle to save a 117 year old house in Minneapolis I began looking into the life of a former local author, Brenda Ueland. She was born in Minneapolis in 1891 and passed away at the age of 94 while residing at 2622 West 44th Street. It…
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The Permaculture City
Book Review To those like myself who did not know what permaculture was before coming across this book I will give a quick summary. Permaculture principles include both natural and human ecosystems. While it tends to be thought of as a system for designing gardens, it can be applied to a range of human activities that are…
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Connectography
Book Review Connectography is not a light summer read for the beach. This book is packed full of insights and ideas for a global economy founded on a priority to expand infrastructure. There are two main takeaways: we need better investment in infrastructure-both hard and soft- and a greater emphasis on mapping. Within this book, there…
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Happy City
Book Review Happy City does not introduce a radical new concept for shaping cities. As the author, Charles Montgomery, points out, Athenians strove for pure happiness as far back as the fifth century A.D. They coined the state of achievement, eudaimonia. Centuries later, in 1943, Abraham Maslow categorized five levels of human needs. The most basic…
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The Planning Lady 