Tag: cities

  • Americans Can’t Kick the Auto Habit

    After looking this week at the growth of the physical size of cities due to improvements in transport technologies, the increasing density of cities, and then the contribution of automobile (especially personal cars) to carbon dioxide emissions, today we look at a piece from the Transport Politic comparing US and French mass transit ridership to…

  • Auto Emissions Stuck in High Gear

    The last two days we looked at densification in cities and how the physical size of cities grew in response to the development of transport technologies, most notably the automobile. Today we look at a New York Times article showing the growth of automobile emissions and the problem they pose for combating the greenhouse gas…

  • Different Paths to Density

    Yesterday we looked at the expansion of city footprints by sprawl, in modern years largely thanks to the automobile. Today, I want to go back to another article I’ve been saving for a wee bit. This one comes from the Economist, though it dates only back to the beginning of October. This article looks at…

  • Mapping the Growth of Cities

    This is an older piece from back in August, but I was waiting for a time when I would have some related articles to post alongside it. To start off the series of posts, we start with this piece from CityLab. As my titles implies, it looks at the growth of cities, but not in…

  • Baby You Can Drive My Non-automobile Personal Mode of Transportation

    Last week was the climate summit in New York, and the science continues to get worse. Any real substantive progress in fighting climate change will require sacrifices and changes to the way our societies function and are organised, including spatially. Because one area that needs to be addressed is the use of personal automobiles that consume oil…

  • Congressional District Population Density

    Tomorrow is Election Day here in the United States and this morning I wanted to look at a piece I’ve had in mind on doing from City Lab. I held off because it looks at the election and what better time to do it than right before the election. Specifically, the article looks at the…

  • Mapping All the Buildings

    I wish I had more for this post. Saturday morning’s New York Times was delivered with this on the front page, above the fold. It promised a special section including graphics that showed every building in the United States with a pullout poster of a large major city. I have been through my Sunday paper…

  • Most Liveable Cities Ranking

    There is nothing super sophisticated in these charts, but I love them all the same. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) published its rankings of the world’s most liveable cities and this year Vienna knocked off Melbourne for top spot. But what about the rest of the list? Thankfully the Economist, a related company, put together…

  • Chinese Urban Clusters

    Yesterday the Economist posted a graphic about Chinese urban clusters, of which the Chinese government is planning to create 19 as part of a development strategy. In terms of design, though, I saw it and said, “I remember doing something like that several years ago”. The Economist piece looks at just the geography of the Chinese…

  • The Disappearing Urban Middle Class

    Today we look at income in American cities and in particular the middle class disappearance. The Guardian published the graphics, but they originate with Metrocosm, LTDB at Brown, and IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System. So what are we looking at? Well, the big one is a set of small multiples of cities and their income breakdowns…