Masdar City

Masdar City

The aspirational city in the Abu Dhabi desert continues to plan and build. It may indeed become a ‘greenprint’ for urban development if it achieves very low or zero-carbon. My editor at AramcoWorld pushed me to find metrics. I wrote about the place, the planners, the...
Seiter family of Scranton and Conway

Seiter family of Scranton and Conway

This family history tells about three generations of Seiters on their farm in Arkansas. It comes from my mother, Mary Magdalen Mammoser née Seiter, who told me many of her memories from childhood. Scranton years My grandparents William and Crescentia Seiter had eight...

A crack in the code

The arcane controversies of planning codes will never stir up much excitement. But I wrote this article to show planners at work, grappling with the world as it is, facing the constant challenge of bringing ideas into practice. The article, published in Planning...

book review: Planning Chicago

Planning Chicago, by Jon DeVries and Brad Hunt, calls for a return to big ideas in a city once famous for bold planning. The authors decry the lack of vision and failure to implement that has beset Chicago planning for decades. And they show the maleffects of this...
Calumet area vision

Calumet area vision

During 2005-08, I led a non-profit environmental organization in the industrial Lake Calumet area. The area is covered with huge brown fields left by the disappearance of steel making two decades before. It’s interspersed with slag and degraded marsh lands. The...