The riots in Baltimore

I was asked to write a piece in The Conversation on the rioting in Baltimore. Click here to access the discussion: The fire this time and the fire last time and the time between.

Baltimore: policing

Baltimore: citizens calling for calm

Scenes from downtown Chicago

Visited Chicago to attend the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference. Had a chance to take a walk around downtown and take some photos.

Millennium Park

Millennium Park

beside the river

Sign at building entrance

View from Art Institute

City Marketing

My article on city marketing was just published in the latest edition of the monumental International Encyclopedia of theSocial and Behavioral Sciences. Here is the abstract:

City marketing has grown in size and importance. A historical contextualization considers the selling of the frontier city, the resort, the suburb, and the industrial city. The article explores the symbolic reconstruction of cities through a discussion of strategies and tactics of city marketing. Marketing strategies include the promotion of the postindustrial city, the global city, the business city, the good city, the green city, the cosmopolitan city, and the city of culture. The tactics of city marketing include namings, slogans, logos, and the construction of iconic buildings. The article discusses what city marketing reveals about social power in cities.

Urban sustainability conference materials

Workshop reports and presentations, videos, photos, speeches and keynote addresses from the Forum on Urban Sustainability held at the French Embassy in DC in March are now available from their media library.  A version of my own keynote address is also available here.

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How green is your city: towards an urban sustainability index

Click here to access my latest article in The Conversation, How green is your city: towards an urban sustainability index, that discusses metrics used to assess the ecological, carbon and water footprint of cities. As we transition into a more urban future, measuring, assessing and evaluating urban environmental impact of cities is of major importance. We are only just beginning the difficult task.  We need to refine these metrics, develop new ones and so create a standardized and easily understood index of city sustainability. With better data and a standard index, policies can be evaluated, targets set and institutions held to account. A robust city sustainability index would benchmark where we are now and provide a measure of progress in the future.  

A visualization of the daily carbon emissions of New York City. Each bubble represents one ton of CO2.