Affordable Housing Institute : US

 
 
Author’s note: Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the last of science fiction’s original Big Three, died yesterday at the age of 90.  Three weeks ago, I was in Colombo, where Clarke lived, and in the very brief period when I wasn’t working with the Slum Dwellers International folks, several colleagues and I strolled to dinner at […]

Making cities work will be the greatest demographic challenge of the twenty-first century.

 
It’s taken me about four months — since Rockefeller’s urban symposium — to figure this out, and get a glimmer of what it means for all of us.
 
Last July, I had the privilege and unbelievable intellectual pleasure of participating in Week 1 of […]

“So, Watson,” Holmes said, filling his pipe with a particularly vile shag that he sometimes favored, “you have been sufficiently enterprising as to visit brother Mycroft to have him explicate the science of securitization, a journey about which you were pleased to post.”

Mycroft was always willing to expound upon money
 
London that April was endlessly blanketed […]

 
After the cities-are-doomed gloom of the 1950’s, as imagined by Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1956) — about which I wrote a two-part post — the 1960’s ushered in a different era of urban pessimism, with the Club of Rome’s frightening pseudo-computerized forecast, The Limits to Growth, and Paul […]

Pull out the linchpin and it comes apart
 
Which is it to be, housing or urbanization?
The tension constantly crops up.  HUD, for instance, is the department of Housing and Urban Development  – two ideas combined in one acronym.  In the UK, the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships may yet combine (in 2009), because one handles housing, […]