Ryan Holiday: This is one of the most important books about cities ever written. It's what helps you understand why cities work, why they don't work, what makes a neighborhood, what destroys neighborhoods and how almost everything city planners and governments think matters, doesn't. Seth Roberts is probably the biggest Jane Jacobs fan there is. He's what she calls an insider-outsider (insider in terms of understanding, outsider in terms of career) She was an activist and a student who understood the system but wasn't wedded to it or dependent on it for a living. It was this unique position that gave her the freedom and the perspective to explain the concept of American cities (and what's killing them) in a way that no one had ever done before. I also think that a lot of Jacobs' ideas about diversity, mixed uses, isolation, wealth and government can be applied to other parts of our lives. The way she gets to the core of neighborhood, passing up the easy or obvious signs that others are mistakenly distracted with, is impressive. There is a great Malcolm Gladwell article where he tries to use some of her ideas to dissect office culture--it's a good start and example about other canvases for her ideas.

There was a time, in the days of Lloyd George and then Attlee, when land reform was a convulsive political issue. It should be so again.

Youth Radio obtained a hand-written business plan from a pimp (PDF below) during our investigation for Trafficked (obtained from a prosecutor.) The business plan titled Keep It Pimpin states how the pimp wants to expand his trafficking business locally as well as nationally. He also writes that he wants to discover girls “from all over”--especially girls in jail houses and in small cities.

New Urbanism is an urban design movement, which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s and continues to reform many aspects of real estate development and urban planning.

He proposed that the population of Milton Keynes (ceremonially Buckinghamshire) should double in the subsequent 20 years. He appointed English Partnerships to do so, taking planning controls away from Milton Keynes Borough Council and making EP the statutory planning authority. In turn, EP established a subsidiary Milton Keynes Partnership to manage the programme locally. Their proposal for the next phase of expansion moves away from grid squares to large scale, mixed use, higher density developments which are more based on public transport than private car usage.

Urban Eden is an organisation dedicated to ensuring that those who know and love Milton Keynes do not sleepwalk through the planned major changes being developed by planners and developers who are seemingly intent on watering down many of the best things about our beautiful city, which we had mistakenly learned to take for granted. We support the realistic expansion of Milton Keynes through growth, and welcome the anticipated improvements to our city and its public realm, but are concerned that the fundamentals of the Master Plan and Original Vision are not lost in the process.

The grid plan, grid street plan or gridiron plan is a type of city plan in which streets run at right angles to each other, forming a grid. In the context of the culture of Ancient Greece, the grid plan is called Hippodamian plan.[1]

Almost 80% of New York's energy consumption is through its buildings, mainly in the larger of the leaky older structures. Though politicians have tended to focus on energy consumption by individuals and tried to persuade families to cut their energy use at home, Malkin said the renovation of the Empire State Building would achieve savings in carbon emissions on a similar scale to comparable moves by 40,000 households.

Might use this for a stag do I have been charged with organising... gulp.