The Top Urban Planning Articles of 2014

For my job, I read a lot of articles on urban policy and planning. I believe that the best policies are usually borrowed from other cities rather than fabricated from nothing. In that spirit, I even borrowed from other top ten lists to create this post. I like to think that my list is more comprehensive than some of the others since I have no incentive to link to my own content. Caveat emptor: I use the term planning loosely. Some of these are more inspirational than germane.

  1. How the Shinkansen bullet train made Tokyo into the monster it is today
  2. City Planner Gets Halfway Through Designing City Before Realizing He’s Just Doing Philadelphia Again
  3. The 11 Worst Buildings of 2014
  4. The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS
  5. The Fall of Planning Expertise
  6. Lego: can this most analogue of toys really be a modern urban planning tool?
  7. The Rent’s Too Damn High! But the Metrocard Is a Pretty Good Deal
  8. Why the People in Charge of Transit Systems Should Be Required to Actually Ride Transit
  9. What Snow Tells Us About Creating Better Public Spaces
  10. The New Cartographers: How a Mapping Renaissance Is Changing the Way We See Cities

This multimedia feature about Mayor Bloomberg’s legacy is still my favorite planning related article (if you can call it that) of all time. But overall, 2013 was a good year.

Related