Antiplanner’s Library: Fool’s Gold
As previously noted, the Antiplanner has been reading a lot of books about the financial crisis lately. Some have tried (but failed) to be comprehensive. Most cover just a slice of the crisis, such as Bear Stearns (House of Cards) or Lehman Brothers (A Colossal Failure of Common Sense) One of the most valuable books […]
Antiplanner’s Library: Triumph of the Cities
The ideas of many urbanologists are heavily influenced by the cities in which they lived or grew up. To defend her mid-rise Greenwich Village neighborhood from “urban renewal,” Jane Jacobs extolled the virtues of such neighborhoods and excoriated both high-rises and suburbs. Many urban planners today, fresh out of college, remember the lively streets of […]
Antiplanner’s Library: Too Big to Fail
The Antiplanner finished reading Too Big to Fail, a 539-page tome describing the events of the financial crisis from the Bear Stearns collapse in March, 2008 to the Treasury’s forced purchase of billions of dollars worth of shares in nine major banks in October, 2008. New York Times reporter Sorkin says the book is based […]
The Antiplanner’s Library: The Economic Crisis
The 2008 financial crisis has proven to be a bonanza for at least one industry: Book publishers have issued dozens of tomes about what went wrong and how to fix it. Lately, the Antiplanner has been reading as many of these as possible. Most of the authors have an axe to grind and many blame […]
Movie Review: North by Northwest
The somewhat tongue-in-cheek movie review earlier this week reminds me of one of my favorite movies. Not many people realize that North by Northwest was actually based on a true story, though of course Hitchcock changed many of the details to make his action/adventure movie. As cinemaphiles will remember, Cary Grant plays Roger O Thornhill, […]
The Antiplanner’s Library: Visiting Paradise
One of the Antiplanner’s co-speakers during a couple of events in Honolulu is David Callies, a law professor and author of two books on Hawaii land-use law: Regulating Paradise and Preserving Paradise. Hawaii passed the first statewide growth-management law in 1961, and still has about the strictest land-use laws in the nation. Not coincidentally, it […]
