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Los Angeles Times
24-05-2025
- Automotive
- Los Angeles Times
This book about parking will change how you see the world
My favorite books fall into one of two categories: novels that immerse me in another world, or nonfiction works that transform how I see our world. When I read the latter, I share what I learned from the book with my partner for months afterward. She jokes that these books become my personality, but it's not really a joke. In grad school, a professor asked us to each share a fun fact about ourselves, and I shared that my favorite book is about parking minimums. (I was studying business, not urban planning, so no one else seemed to find this very 'fun.') When given the chance to write this newsletter, I knew I had to convince subscribers to check out 'Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World' by Henry Grabar. True to the title, it will change how you see the world — it did for me, at least. Today, I talk to Grabar about why he became fascinated with parking policy, whether L.A. can pull off a car-free Summer Olympics in 2028 and how the current White House administration is affecting the future of American transportation. I also share some of my other favorite books about transportation and urban planning before checking out the latest news in the book world. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. You cover various urban issues for Slate. Was there a book that inspired your interest in these topics? The first thing I read about city planning that made me feel like this was a real subject of inquiry and study was Jane Jacobs' famous book, 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities.' She even has a passage about parking lots as 'border vacuums' and the way that they kind of suck the life out of the surrounding streets. I read that when I was probably 17. My direct inspiration for 'Paved Paradise' came more out of my reporting for Slate. It just seemed that beneath every single subject, there was a story about parking. Then I learned that many people in the field had already devoted their careers to studying parking. But that just meant there was a lot of interesting material there and a big gap between what professionals understood about the importance of parking and what the general public saw as its role. You mentioned Jane Jacobs' book. What are some of your lesser-known favorite books about transportation and urban planning? 'Family Properties' by Beryl Satter is a great book about race and housing in Chicago. 'Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age' by Lizabeth Cullen is a biography, but it's also an urban renewal history that offers an interesting and nuanced perspective on the aims of the urban renewers. 'The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York' by Suleiman Osman holds many interesting lessons for our cities today. As a famously sprawling city, L.A. features prominently in Paved Paradise. Since the book came out, city leaders have promoted the idea of a car-free Olympics. Do you think that's feasible? That would be great. I hope they stick to that aim. It's going to be challenging, of course, but at the same time, if there's one thing we know about mega-events, it's just very, very difficult on a spatial level to get everybody where they're going if everyone arrives in a single-family vehicle. I was at the Olympics in Paris last year, where I met [L.A. Mayor] Karen Bass very briefly. She seemed inspired by what was happening there. But it's hard to make a point-by-point comparison between Paris and Los Angeles because they're such different cities. At the same time, I do think planners in L.A. grasp this will be a much more fun event if it can summon some of that public-spiritedness that was on display in Paris, where the venues and the fans zones were all connected, rather than these isolated sites that are only accessed by car. Since you published your book, Donald Trump has returned to the White House. To what degree does the federal government affect how much, at a city level, we are able to chip away at our parking-dependent infrastructure? The federal government is a huge player in the way our cities and streets look. There are a lot of city and county transportation departments wondering what will happen with these projects where money was allocated by Washington or they were expecting it to be allocated later. If there's any silver lining to it, to accomplish their transportation goals, cities are going to have to do more with less and rethink some of the policy decisions they've taken for granted that are in their control, like parking policy. Is there another topic in this realm that you hope to turn into a book someday? I'm working on another book that follows the construction of a series of multifamily buildings from start to finish. By embedding with these projects as they make their way through the acquisition of the land, the design of the building, the zoning, the permitting, the financing and finally the construction, I'll be able to identify and illuminate some of the barriers to having enough housing that go beyond whether it is permitted by zoning, which I know is a hot topic in California. I'm trying to look across the country because this is increasingly a national problem, and there are variations from place to place in the issues that come into play. Now for some other books that have, to varying degrees, become my personality… 'Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet' explains how highways affect wildlife in ways both obvious (roadkill) and obscure (traffic noise pushing birds away from their habitats). Author Ben Goldfarb also highlights the creative solutions road ecologists are coming up with to help animals navigate our car-centric world. If you've had an address your whole life, you've probably never thought much about it. 'The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power' changed that for me. Author Deirdre Mask digs into the consequences of not having an address, the dark reasoning behind why we began numbering homes and so much more. In 'Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation,' author Paris Marx pokes holes in many of the silver-bullet transportation solutions we have today, from autonomous vehicles to electric scooters, arguing these efforts often overlook the most vulnerable in our society and sometimes create more problems than they solve. (Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to whose fees support independent bookstores.) Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's buzzy book about Joe Biden's diminished capacities and the associated cover-up is 'reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids,' Leigh Haber writes in her review of 'Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.' Times television and media business reporter Stephen Battaglio spoke with Tapper about the book. 'I have never experienced the ability to get behind the scenes in so many different rooms as for these recountings as I was for this book,' the CNN anchor said. 'I felt like people needed to get this off their chest. It was almost like they were unburdening themselves.' Media mogul Barry Diller's memoir, 'Who Knew,' hit shelves this week. Here are the four biggest revelations. In his new book, 'Is a River Alive?,' Robert Macfarlane questions the way we treat nature by visiting three threatened rivers in different parts of the world. With his 40th novel, 'Nightshade,' out this week, author and former Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Connelly shared what keeps him writing at 68 years old. In his new book, 'Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight,' David A. Kessler argues Big Food has purposefully engineered ultraprocessed foods to be addictive. The Times spoke with Kessler, a former FDA commissioner, about healthy long-term weight-loss strategies, guidelines for using GLP-1s safely, the body-positivity movement and improving lifespan. If you haven't gotten enough book recs by this point in the newsletter, The Times has also compiled 30 must-read books for summer.
Winnipeg Free Press
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
A 21-gun salute for urban theorist Jane Jacobs
After her time meeting with the City of Winnipeg in the '90s, the world's most famous urban theorist Jane Jacobs was reportedly gifted a $10 watch with the city logo. 'It's so funny because it came in this fancy little box,' laughs Caitlin Broms-Jacobs, Jane's granddaughter, an oboist living and working in Winnipeg. If this gift seems like a token of underappreciation, Winnipeg offers Jane something of a 21-gun salute this May. Supplied Caitlin with grandma Jane That's the number of Jane's Walks hosted in Winnipeg this year between Friday and Sunday during the annual festival of free, community led-walking tours inspired by Jacobs. Started by friends and colleagues of hers shortly after her death in 2006, the concept quickly spread to cities around the world — more than 500 of them to date, according to the fest's Toronto-based steering committee. 'It's all very decentralized and self-organizing,' says Jim Jacobs, Jane's son. He lives in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood, where Caitlin grew up and Jane lived after emigrating to Canada from the United States in the late '60s. 'Its focus and value are not in promoting her thoughts or ideas… but to provide a soapbox,' he goes on. 'People will say whatever they want to say and if the audience likes it, they'll stay. And if they don't, they'll beat their feet!' This grassroots freedom is already in a certain Jacobian spirit. Jane Jacobs' complex ideas evolved considerably after her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities; the first book of many by a self-educated mother of three, which ultimately turned the urban-planning establishment on its head. (Although her son observes that that establishment absorbed her ideas in ways that today sometimes amount to little more than window dressing — big shows of 'community consultation,' for instance, that do little to shape planners' schemes.) Supplied Jane Jacobs (left) with her son Jim and granddaughter Caitlin at Toronto's Annex Fair But certain throughlines tie this tapestry together. Jacobs championed vibrant, walkable neighbourhoods built on diversity, density and mixed-use development. She famously opposed top-down planning and urban renewal projects that she believed devastated communities. Instead, she emphasized local knowledge and organic interactions between everyday people — 'eyes on the street' — in shaping successful urban life. If some of these ideas seem taken for granted today, it speaks to Jacobs' towering influence — an influence resisted at first by an establishment more smitten with modernist visions that served 'order and progress' at the expense of human-scale urbanism. Jane Jacobs became famous not just for her theories, but for her David-and-Goliath battles, waged with wit and grit, against powerful planners in New York and Toronto. It's this plucky spirit from which local community organizer Michael Champagne and Jane's Walk leader draws inspiration. Supplied 'I know that too many people just drive down Selkirk Avenue or Main Street to get from one part of the city to the other,' says Champagne, who also organizes North End History, committed to social activist and heritage enterprises in the neighbourhood. He leads 100 Years of Main Street: Commerce and Community from 1 to 2 p.m. Saturday and Selkirk Avenue: Yesterday & Tomorrow from 1 to 2 p.m. Sunday. 'These walks invite Winnipeggers to get out of their vehicles to see the vibrant local organizations, businesses and people that are here because, like Jane Jacobs, we believe our community problems can be answered when we're together.' Other Jane's Walks this year explore Old Saint Boniface, the Exchange District and the histories of its garment and grain industries, St Norbert's forests and more. 'These walks are a nice, hyper-localized opportunity for us to listen to and learn about the solutions that are working,' says Champagne. Supplied According to Broms-Jacobs, Jane left her tour of Winnipeg especially interested in the North End's history and future — a locale that, for all the challenges it may face, has a strong neighbourhood identity encompassing a mosaic of social groups and uses. What would she make of present-day Winnipeg? 'Jane observed from a political point of view that having a city's government controlled by its suburbs is devastating to a city,' says Jim Jacobs. Notwithstanding, he has an optimistic vision of the city. 'There are certain long-standing characteristics of Winnipeg that count in its favour, even if they're under-exploited, like a lot of mixed-use neighborhoods,' says Jim Jacobs. 'And there are these older buildings, some of which provide lower rent and more flexibility, more flexibility for entrepreneurs, community groups and artists.' Supplied Caitlin with grandma Jane MIKE SUDOMA / Free Press files Michael Redhead Champagne will lead two Jane's Walks in the North End. Wednesdays A weekly look towards a post-pandemic future. One of those artists is Broms-Jacobs, who performs with such organizations as the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and the Fierbois duo, often in the city's older, more centrally located churches that now serve partially as music venues. 'It's an open-minded, artistic, sensitive town … new ideas can flourish because it's not so crushingly expensive,' she says. 'And in the (15 years) that I've been here, I've just noticed such an amazing increase in diversity in the way that Torontonians think of diversity — in the international sense.' To see the full list of Winnipeg's 2025 Jane's Walk and to register visit The events are all free. Supplied Winnipeg-based oboist Caitlin Broms-Jacobs is Jane Jacobs' granddaughter. Conrad SweatmanReporter Conrad Sweatman is an arts reporter and feature writer. Before joining the Free Press full-time in 2024, he worked in the U.K. and Canadian cultural sectors, freelanced for outlets including The Walrus, VICE and Prairie Fire. Read more about Conrad. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
The Spinoff
28-04-2025
- Automotive
- The Spinoff
Windbag: The rise and fall of character areas
After the high court backed Wellington City Council's decision to reduce the city's character areas, Joel MacManus looks back at the five decades that shaped the restrictive housing policy. The motorway came and tore the community in two. A great big gash of concrete. Eight lanes of destruction and separation. Thorndon is New Zealand's oldest residential neighbourhood; the place where the British occupation of Wellington city began. Then, Wellington Urban Motorway cut right through its heart. The foothills motorway, as it was originally known, was first laid out in 1963 by an American consulting firm. By 1978, it was complete. Hundreds of homes were demolished, and thousands of bodies were dug up from Bolton Street cemetery and dumped in a mass grave. Whether or not you believe the motorway was necessary – and many today would say it was – Thorndon was never the same. Arguably, Thorndon no longer exists as one cohesive area. The chunk on the city side of the motorway could more accurately be called Pipitea, and the other side is centred around Tinakori Village. It wasn't the first time this had happened, and it wouldn't be the last. In the 1890s, entire blocks of Wellington were demolished in 'slum clearance' because council authorities decided they had become so unsanitary that destruction was the only option. In the 2000s, the Inner City Bypass tore through the 'bohemian' areas at the back of Te Aro, demolishing dozens more homes and changing the fabric of the community. In the 1960s, the motorway construction faced years of protest from locals who correctly foresaw the damage it would do to their community. It was a time when change was in the air. The postwar boom had made cars financially accessible to the masses, and suburban living was the hot new thing. Cities around the world, trying to respond to the influx of traffic clogging their streets, embraced urban motorways as the future. The hot new thing in city planning was modernism, which emphasised large-scale infrastructure, car-centric development, and top-down control to impose order and efficiency on chaotic urban environments. The movement was exemplified by New York's powerful planning commissioner Robert Moses. His most famous and controversial project was the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have demolished 416 buildings and the entire neighbourhood of Greenwich Village. What happened next has become part of the gospel of urban design. Jane Jacobs, a journalist and activist with no formal qualifications in urban planning, started a campaign against the expressway. Her writing, most notably The Death and Life of Great American Cities, pushed back against Moses' unsympathetic approach, advocating instead for human-scale design, vibrant streets, public spaces and the organic complexity of neighbourhood life. She viewed cities from the ground, while Moses saw them from a 30,000-foot view. The modernists liked high-rise housing projects, separated from one another by wide roads and green spaces. Jacobs encouraged a great appreciation for older buildings and medium-density blocks, where everything was connected. Today, Jacobs is known as 'the mother of urban design'. Hundreds of cities around the world celebrate her birthday on May 4 by holding Jane's Walks, volunteer-led walking tours that highlight interesting and overlooked parts of the city. Living Streets Aotearoa is hosting one in Wellington this weekend. In response to the motorway construction and inspired by Jacobs' ideas, Thorndon residents created the Thorndon Society to 'protect and preserve' what remained of Thorndon. They organised walking tours in their area, installed information signs and plaques highlighting notable homes, and encouraged a renewed interest in neighbourhood character. In 1974, Thorndon residents successfully lobbied Wellington City Council to create New Zealand's first special character area: Residential E Zone, a five-hectare area centred around Sydney Street West. It was the remnant of an old residential gully that had been mostly wiped out by the motorway, filled with an interesting combination of grand wooden villas and small workers' cottages. It did not mean that every building within the zone was subject to heritage restriction, though some individual buildings are heritage-listed, including the Rita Angus Cottage. The intent of the Residential E Zone was purely stylistic; any alterations or new buildings had to be approved by the council to ensure they fitted within the existing architectural style. The Thorndon Society's newsletters from the time, which are archived online, made it clear that 'the zone was not intended as a museum zone and elements of change are inevitable'. Gradually, though, the Thorndon Society's ambitions grew. It opposed a new apartment building on Murphy Street, a new church on Hill Street, two townhouse developments on Grant Street, a doctor's surgery on Tinakori Road, and several new offices. Perhaps most egregiously, the society took Wellington City Council to the planning tribunal to stop a restaurant at 328 Tinakori Road (the site of the recently closed Daisy's) from expanding to add 20 additional seats. In today's eyes, this seems absurdly anti-business. But at the time, the society was operating from a position of fear. In the words of one newsletter writer: 'Contemplate the amount of traffic that can be generated by the addition of 20 extra seats to an existing cafe, a takeaway food outlet, a childcare centre or a supermarket… increased traffic congestion lends argument for road widening and subsequent destruction of historic buildings.' By 1989, the Thorndon Society was pushing to expand Residential E Zone to cover broader swathes of Thorndon. In the 1990s, a new generation of activists fought against the Inner City Bypass (including current city councillors Iona Pannett and Laurie Foon). The protesters took inspiration from the Thorndonites and the Jacobites, leading to a renewed interest in neighbourhood protection. In the 2000 District Plan, Wellington City Council added character areas in Aro Valley, Berhampore, Mt Victoria, Mt Cook, Newtown, and more of Thorndon. Further additions were made in 2008 and 2011. These new character areas weren't like Residential Zone E. They weren't just focused on small, architecturally cohesive areas. They covered entire suburbs. And the legal restrictions were much stronger. No house built before 1930, regardless of condition or style, could be demolished without a resource consent, which meant neighbours had immense power to block new developments. It seems no one realised just how vast the character areas had become until, in 2019, the NZ Herald's Georgina Campbell reported that they covered 87.9% of land parcels in Wellington's inner residential areas. Laurie Foon – now the deputy mayor – said she 'felt really sick and stunned' when she saw the numbers. The pushback against character areas was led by A City for People, a group of young activists closely tied to Generation Zero. They were part of the rising yimby movement (yes in my backyard). They believed rules preventing new housing developments (such as character areas) had played a key role in the housing crisis. A City for People started a campaign to eliminate, or at least seriously reduce, the character areas. For them, it wasn't just about housing supply, but urban form – they wanted higher-density housing close to the city centre and train lines so people could live low-carbon lifestyles. In the submissions on the council's Spatial Plan in 2020 and District Plan in 2022, the yimbys were vastly outnumbered. But they convinced a majority at the council table to support their position. Marko Garlick's submissions for Generation Zero and A City for People became the key piece of evidence the council used to reduce the areas covered by character restrictions from 306 hectares to 85 hectares. Housing minister Chris Bishop signed off the change last year, and the new District Plan became official. Live Wellington, a group that supports character restrictions, launched a judicial review challenging the decision. On April 17, the high court backed the council and the minister's decision. (Emma Ricketts wrote an excellent explainer of the case for Stuff.) Bishop has signalled that his upcoming reforms to the Resource Management Act may make it more difficult for councils to create character areas – or even force councils to compensate homeowners if they impose rules preventing them from developing their property. The yimbys won the battle and, with the political winds blowing in their direction, it seems likely that they'll win the war. But I'm not sure they've ever truly understood their opponents. Supporters of character areas have been accused of creating a supply shortage to boost their property values. But that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. If someone only cared about their property value, they would want their land to be more developable, not less. They've been accused of wanting to keep poor people out of their area, but that ignores the fact that character areas have some of the highest rates of renters. Others have suggested fans of character areas are simply old-fashioned conservatives who don't want anything to change. But the people who fought the bypass and the motorway weren't conservatives. They were progressives. The Thorndon Society had to defend itself against claims that it was an extension of the Labour Party. Character areas were a well-intended policy, but they were a victim of their own success. The Jacobites successfully created a new appreciation for neighbourhood character and historic architectural styles. In the 1980s, cheap government-backed loans encouraged people to renovate old villas, and they did so en masse. The idea of 'slum clearance' for new motorways fell out of fashion. Robert Moses is reviled, Jane Jacobs is beloved. The policy problem that character areas were created to solve mostly no longer exists. But all solutions eventually beget new problems. In the case of character areas, they contributed to an inner-city housing shortage, high rents, urban sprawl and a generation of young people locked out of the property ladder. We can, and should, recognise that people have powerful emotional connections to character areas and the wooden villas within them. But we should also recognise that cities must evolve, and that confronting the housing crisis necessarily requires change.
Boston Globe
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
The 60-year-old book that can help cities reduce gun violence
What are the conventional wisdoms that have gotten us into this mess? The conventional wisdom of the left views gun violence as being largely about guns. The best available data suggests there is truth to this view: If there were some way to disappear the 400 million guns in America (a country of 330 million people), murders would decline substantially. But we can all see what the politics of gun control look like, especially at the national level. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up The left also tends to see gun violence as due to bad economic conditions, driven by desperate people doing whatever it takes to feed their families. But ending the big 'root causes' of these conditions — such as poverty, segregation, social isolation — is complicated, leading to a sense that gun violence is 'too big to fix.' Advertisement The conventional wisdom on the right says gun violence is due to intrinsically bad people who are unafraid of the criminal justice system. That's led to policies that try to disincentivize gun violence with the threat of ever-longer prison sentences. The result of following this approach has been the highest incarceration rate of any nation and a murder rate unheard of in any other rich country. Advertisement We have the worst of all worlds. So what should we do? We should look back to Jane Jacobs's 1961 book 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities.' Jacobs noticed that within her home city of New York, similarly poor areas wound up having dramatically different levels of violence. That means gun violence isn't determined purely by root causes like poverty. It also means gun violence can't be due just to people's moral character (surely that doesn't vary by neighborhood) or to the criminal justice system or gun laws (since those are the same everywhere within the same city). What does make a difference? Jacobs argued that similarly poor neighborhoods had such different levels of violence in large part because they differed in the degree to which they had residents out and about, and willing to step in to interrupt trouble before it escalated. She called this 'eyes on the street.' Jane Jacobs in the 2016 documentary film "Citizen Jane: Battle for the City." Courtesy of IFC Films Notice that conventional wisdom suggests eyes on the street should be largely irrelevant to violence. The left and the right implicitly share the core assumption that before anyone ever pulls a trigger, they engage in some deliberate weighing of the pros and cons. Conventional wisdom suggests violence interrupted is merely violence delayed. But conventional wisdom misunderstands what most shootings are. Most shootings start with words — arguments that escalate and end in tragedy because someone has a gun. Advertisement Whatever people are doing in the middle of a heated argument, it's most definitely not a careful, deliberate weighing of pros and cons. In those moments, most of us are instead acting emotionally, almost automatically. This connects to an important lesson from behavioral economics, as summarized in the wonderful book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow,' by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. All of us engage in two types of cognition, but we're only aware of one. The 'voice in our head' that we usually think of as 'thinking' can indeed be rational, deliberate, and calculating. Kahneman calls it 'system 2.' But that type of thinking is slow. So our minds also carry out a different type of thinking — 'system 1' — that happens below the level of consciousness. It's a set of automatic responses designed to work well for routine, low-stakes things we encounter daily, but it can get us into big trouble in high-stakes situations — as when a gun is present. This is why eyes on the street are so important: System 1 motivation for gun violence is fleeting. In other words, violence interrupted is usually violence prevented. Many rigorous studies support this view. Anything that gets more eyes on the street reduces violence. That's why police walking the streets prevent violent crime. They don't just make arrests but also interrupt violence. The same is true of private security guards in a neighborhood. But critically, having eyes on the street is also about things we don't normally associate with gun violence prevention at all. It means we need to ensure that poor neighborhoods have stores that draw people out of their homes. We need to clean up abandoned lots to make inviting places for people to spend time. We need to ensure public areas are well lit. Advertisement These may seem like small things — distractions from what conventional wisdom has been arguing for. But the data suggests each of these urban planning policies can have impacts on violence that are remarkably large — reductions of 10 percent, 20 percent, even 30 percent. When taken together, these measures accumulate into massive, almost transformative differences. For example, on the South Side of Chicago, where I live, there are two adjoining neighborhoods — Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore — with nearly identical levels of poverty and similar demographics. They are governed by the same gun laws and criminal justice system. What's different is that South Shore has fewer vacant lots, less disorder (like graffiti) that discourages people from coming outside, and 50 percent more land devoted to stores and other commercial uses. And on a per capita basis, shootings are just half as common in South Shore as in Greater Grand Crossing. Solving the problem of gun violence in America will require us to see more clearly what it is and what causes it. That points to surprising solutions — including the vital importance of urban planning. Urban planning is all about shaping the figurative health of our communities. But it also turns out to be vitally important for ensuring the literal health of our communities. Jane Jacobs can show us how.
