Tag: Development

How to House America

Fixing the American housing crisis will require constructing more houses, but also increasing subsidies and protections for existing tenants.

Design Against Disaster

What is to be done? We are the hapless victims of rising temperatures and tides, droughts and superstorms. Infrastructure buckles and the water is full of lead. Of course all urban ecological ...

Beyond the Bubble

This essay was originally published in The Caravan.   In 2002, a year after Amartya Sen’s well-known essay on hunger, “Old Torments and New Blunders,” was first published, I travelled through ...

City of the Future

This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. “Been gardening?” the Greens campaigner asks. I’ve stopped to chat, knees and hands ...

How Gentrifiers Gentrify

This past spring a new French restaurant opened in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Located on Malcolm X Boulevard, directly across the street from a Crown Fried Chicken, the ...

Everyday India

Nikhil Suroshe is the child of small farmers in Yavatmal district, Maharashtra. He is fair-skinned, with a mop of brown hair and a regal nose, and in India, where skin is often read as an indicator ...

The Dress Has Always Been News

As “the dress” befuddled the Internet’s hive mind, our newsfeeds swelled. Tumblr and Buzzfeed, recognizing the viral power of a garment that appears gold and white to some but blue and black to ...

American Cassandra

A Prophet for Our Times   The modern American prophet cloaks himself in the trope of youthful utopianism lost, and the latest practitioner of this prophetic genre is Francis Fukuyama. His prose ...

All Eyes On Brazil

With the 2014 FIFA World Cup now well under way, and the Olympics coming in 2016, Brazil is assuming its place on the world stage. The current tournament has generated more coverage of the ...

Masters of Reinvention

For the first 40 years of his life, Albert O. Hirschman was a little-known accessory to world-historic events. Born in Berlin in 1915, he was a refugee from Nazi Germany who wound his way through ...