What kind of future do we want to live in? While that question gets asked by planners and futurists in an abstract and technical way, some of the most powerful and interesting conversations about our future aspirations are reflected in…
Yesterday we took a close look at Ford’s vision for the future of cities. Our take: Ford’s preferred narrative of the places we’ll live is all about optimizing city life for vehicles. But is that the narrative that should guide…
What stories do we tell ourselves about the kind of world we want to live in? In his recent presidential address to the American Economics Association, Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller talked about “narrative economics.” He argues that economists, like…
One of the themes we stress at City Observatory is the large and growing importance of talent (the education and skills of the population) to determining regional and local economic success. As we shift more and more to a knowledge-based…
What City Observatory did this week 1.What HOT Lanes tell us about the value of travel time. The economic underpinning of claims that traffic congestion costs Americans billions and billions of dollars each year is the assumption that travelers would…