Is the urban renaissance over? Earlier this week, The New York Times published an op-ed from Jed Kolko–”Seattle Climbs but Austin Sprawls, The Myth of the Return to Cities”–offering up another iteration of his long running argument that the urban rebound…
Why we’re very skeptical about urban farming. At City Observatory, we don’t tend to have a lot of content about agriculture. Farming is not an urban activity. But every so often, we read techno-optimistic stories about how a new era…
What City Observatory did this week 1. Volunteering as a measure of social capital. Thanks to the work of Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and more recently, Our Kids, there’s a growing understanding of the important role of social…
Here are two ideas that, if you’re like most Americans, you probably mostly agree with: Government policy should help keep housing broadly affordable, so as not to price out people of low or moderate incomes from entire neighborhoods, cities, or…
Volunteering is one of the hallmarks of community; here are the cities with the highest rates of volunteerism The decline of the civic commons, the extent to which American’s engage with one another in the public realm, especially across class…