Morris Newman

Remember the cliché about “the deal you can’t refuse?” The park-for-a-billboard caper in the city of Los Angeles is just such a deal. I’ll tell you about it. (Just as soon, that is, as you put that bottle back in the bag where it belongs. I have no desire to add another item to my institutional resume.)

Granted, the billboard story is hard to explain, because at bottom this deal makes so little sense. » read more | add to cart

When individuals barter, they generally have a firm sense of underlying value, i.e. “What’s this thing really worth to me?” A 10-year-old car might be worth $1,000, to judge from the Recycler or Craig’s List. At $20,000, a used car is a bargain only if it is a 1949 Ferrari Spider with the original piping on the seats.

Cities, on the other hand, often appear not to have a sense of “beyond this price we will not go.” True, they bargain for big things on which it is hard to pin values, such as stadiums for NFL football and professional soccer. Still, the fact that cities are willing to entertain highly aggressive offers suggests to me that some city officials have a hard time drawing a line between a good deal and a bad one.

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The city of Dublin in Alameda County bears little resemblance to the English countryside of the late 1800s. The scene is not sylvan, to put it mildly. Instead of a landscape of mills, farms and contented cows, we see one of the Bay Area’s fastest growing cities, proliferating with enormous apartment blocks and office buildings. Although there are easily accessible, undeveloped hills rising just beyond the west and east sides of Dublin, it’s doubtable that Constable, the painter of lowing herds and hayricks, would have memorialized the town on canvas.

What Dublin and the English countryside of 100 years ago have in common, however, are carefully planned villages that attempt to combine city living, including factory work and shopping, with the healthfulness of open space and farms. » read more | add to cart

Like boxers vying for a title, two very different ideas of planning are competing for the future of Alameda Point, a 770-acre community carved out of the former military base next to Alameda, the city. » read more | add to cart

Many things have improved in the past 30 years. Examples are the quality of digital cameras, the design of camping tents and the critical standing of comic books. Others have gotten worse, such as gasoline prices, the narrowing separation between church and state and the reputation of postmodern architecture. But - has sustainable planning gotten better or worse?

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Why is Trump asking the city to get involved in his purchase of Running Horse?

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If any part of Los Angeles begs for redevelopment, it would be a 2,600-acre terrain in the northeast San Fernando Valley known as Sun Valley. » read more | add to cart

Just as a well-aimed bowling ball can be expected to knock down all ten pins and boost a bowler to a top score, many planners believe that a well-written zoning ordinance can steer the housing market toward socially beneficial ends. There is a difference between a bowling lane, however, and a downtown area. » read more | add to cart

San Marcos is suffering from a syndrome. (We’re talking metaphors here, gentlemen; no need to call the process server.) The name of the ailment that afflicts this attractive, upscale suburb north of San Diego could be called Nowhere in Particular Syndrome. The symptoms include the lack of a center, coupled with a sense that one could be nearly anywhere in America—anywhere, in fact, that suffers from the same anonymity. » read more | add to cart

Mathematicians often take delight in Cat’s Cradle, the age-old game of making string figures on one’s fingers. In the most familiar form of this game, one person starts out with a simple rectangle of yarn or string, and then makes a simple figure by looping different parts of the yarn around his or her fingers. This figure is then passed to the fingers of a second player, who introduces another layer of complexity into the figure before passing the increasingly complex string figure to a third player. And so on, until the figure becomes so complex that it becomes impossible to go further, at least with a two-foot length of yarn. » read more | add to cart