Tag: sunday reading

Welcome back to Sunday reading. This week, we’re starting with an article for the bird-lovers. The NZ Herald’s science reporter Jamie Morton reports that city tuis are changing their song: Tui are renowned for their wide repertoire of songs – it’s been estimated at more than 300 – yet we’re only just beginning to find out how urban environments are influencing their singing behaviour.…

Welcome back to Sunday reading. This week we’re leading off with a public service announcement: regular walking is a great way to get fit and healthy. In Vox, Alasdair Wilkins writes about how he lost 100 pounds [45 kgs] in a year: Just so we’re completely clear about how unqualified I am to tell people how to lose weight, I’ll run down how I lost that 100 pounds.…

Welcome back to Sunday reading. This week, we’re starting with a look at the law of unintended consequences. At Vox, Brad Plumer describes how “Europe’s love affair with diesel cars has been a disaster“: Europe’s diesel push seemed like a perfectly sensible idea at the time.…

Welcome back to Sunday reading. The most interesting thing I’ve read this week is actually about macroeconomics, rather than urban issues. As it deals with trends in Asia, a region that we’re now economically intertwined with, it’s still worth thinking about.…

Tim Harford, “What cities tell us about the economy“, Undercover Economist: Jacobs is not the only person to argue that economic development may be profitably studied through a magnifying glass. A new research paper from three development economists, William Easterly, Laura Freschi and Steven Pennings, offers “A Long History of a Short Block” — a Shinohata-style tale of the economic development of a single 486ft block of Greene Street, between Houston and Prince Street in downtown Manhattan.…

Jonah Lehrer, “A physicist solves the city“, NY Times. This article is a few years old but still thought-provoking. It discusses a physicist’s analysis of the data on cities. The key finding is that resource consumption increases more slowly than city size, while economic activity and human interaction increases more rapidly.…

Lily Kuo, “African cities are starting to look eerily like Chinese ones“, Citylab. A good feature on Africa’s growing and changing cities, which are getting a lot in the way of investment and technical advice from Chinese firms. African cities are (in my view) going to become increasingly important over the next century – my main hope is that their population growth is matched with economic and social dynamism: Do you see similarities between the pace and kind of urbanization in Africa that you do in China?…

David Killick, “Christchurch needs an eco-neighbourhood like Vauban“, The Press: PERSPECTIVE: Vauban, in Freiburg, south-west Germany, is one of the world’s most celebrated residential eco-neighbourhoods. With its solar power, “plus-energy” buildings, and accessible streets, Vauban offers a bold sustainable vision for the future of urban or suburban living.…

Yonah Freemark, “For rail services, downtown sometimes isn’t the right place for a terminus“, The Transport Politic: There’s a romantic notion of the downtown rail terminal in the American popular culture, often expressed in movies and books. It’s a scene that is easy to conjure up in one’s mind: The steaming locomotive comes slowly to a halt at the end of a track, passengers stream out into a giant waiting room, and from there they exit into the bustling metropolis.…

Matt Yglesias, “Here’s what the world would look like if every country had the same population“, Vox: Maps are a great way to illustrate the world, but I’ve always been fascinated by maps that illustrate worlds that might have been. To me, redditor frayuk’s new map of the world divided into 200 countries with equal populations hits both of those bugs.…