Urbanism

Tear Up the Dodger Stadium Parking Lot

Dodger Stadium

It’s not just the Dodgers’ bullpen that needs revision

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ second consecutive World Series flameout has management considering a number of important off-season questions. What is Clayton Kershaw’s future at the club? Will Manny Machado, who reportedly left the stadium after Game 4 wearing a “Villains” backwards cap, get the boot? Here at the Emmett Institute, we have been pondering another …

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Scooter

Criticism of electric scooters misses the climate change and pedestrian safety benefits

If you live in a major city on the West Coast or in handful of cities on the East Coast, you probably have an opinion on the electric scooters that have been dropped haphazardly onto your local streets and sidewalks. And it’s probably not a positive one. But I’m here to tell you why scooters …

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The Very Hungry City

No — not a children’s book for an urban environmentalist.  A grown-up book published just yesterday for anyone interested in urban environmentalism, by the University of Vermont’s Austin Troy.  Here’s the blurb from the publisher (Yale): As global demand for energy grows and prices rise, a city’s energy consumption becomes increasingly tied to its economic …

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Anti-Urbanism in American Life: The Case of the Passport

For Thanksgiving, I was in Montreal for a family event, which was a little funny, since Canadian Thanksgiving went by about six weeks ago.  But it did give me an opportunity to see a strange tick in one part of America’s self-conception. Take a look at your US passport.  In the section for visas, you …

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Why Don’t Californians Talk About Politics?

That was the question posed by a Zocalo forum this evening here in Los Angeles.  I wasn’t there — I was actually at my daughter’s school’s ice cream social, talking with other parents about politics, actually.  But had I been at the forum, I would have mentioned one partial theory that a friend of mine, …

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Will Bombay Choke the Queen’s Necklace?

Marine Drive in Bombay, better known as the Queen’s Necklace (pictured), is one of the most beautiful waterfronts in the world.  That’s why it is so depressing to learn that the Maharahstra state government seems to want to destroy it.  Per DNA India, the state’s chief minister,  Prithviraj Chavan, is meeting with Union Environment Minister Jairam …

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Ed Glaeser Should Get Out More

Harvard’s Ed Glaeser has long been regarded as one of the most astute economists around: economics Nobel laureate George Akerlof thinks he’s a “genius.” But if he keeps writing posts like this, it will serve as evidence less about him and more about the collapse of economics as a serious profession. Glaeser and my UCLA …

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