Archinect - News

Is "Burning Man urbanization" a useful planning model?

2019-09-09T20:00:00-04:00

Most of the structure that has been added since [Burning Man's 1996 revival] feels invisible to the people who come: the streets that are surveyed to be exactly 40 feet wide, the plazas that steer people together without crowding them, the 430 fire extinguishers around town, each tracked by its own QR code. The goal now, one planner explained to Mr. Romer, is to make Black Rock City just safe enough that people can joke about dying without actually dying.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer and The New York Times writer Emily Badger explore the urban economics of Burning Man's Black Rock City while envisioning the potential relevance of the instant-city planning model amid massive, worldwide urbanization.

Connectivity matters most in global urban economic growth

2016-04-22T13:57:00-04:00

Cities are mankind’s most enduring and stable mode of social organization, outlasting all empires and nations over which they have presided...it is not population or territorial size that drives world-city status, but economic weight, proximity to zones of growth, political stability, and attractiveness for foreign capital. In other words, connectivity matters more than size. Cities thus deserve more nuanced treatment on our maps than simply as homogeneous black dots.

Global strategist Parag Khanna gives his outlook on the economic future of the world's megacities.

These are the most economically distressed cities in the United States

2016-03-01T17:52:00-05:00

While cities like Dallas and San Francisco have rebounded strongly since the recession, many other places are still struggling for economic growth and prosperity. As time goes on, we're seeing a divergence between successful parts of the country and the non-successful parts. More than 50 million Americans live in "distressed" ZIP codes, according to a new report from the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington D.C. think-tank.

"These areas—largely concentrated in the South, Southwest, and the Rust Belt—are suffering a "recovery gap" driven by low home investment, shuttering businesses, and poor job opportunities."

According to the report, economic opportunities are intimately tethered to geography in the United States. In turn, the regions most susceptible to job loss remain those with a history of financial woes, in particular former manufacturing hubs.

The report ranked cities based on economic indications such as the percentage of the population with a high school degree; housing vacancy rates; unemployment rates among adults; poverty rates; median income rations; percent changes in the number of available jobs; and percent changes in the number of businesses.

Here are the 10 most "distressed" cities in the United States:

1. Cleveland, Ohio

2. Detroit, Michigan

3. Newark, New Jersey

4. Toledo, Ohio

5. San Bernardino, California

6. Stockton, California

7. Milwaukee, Wisconsin

8. Buffalo, New York

9. ...