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I traveled several times to Brazil during the early 2000s and made good friends in Sâo Paulo. I became fascinated with Brazil’s great industrial city, so immense, so dense, so vast and spread out like a huge human hive. I wrote a feature-length piece Citizens Map a Megacity for Américas magazine. Later that year I was on a US State Dept. fellowship…
After visiting Milan, I went to see friend Dave Stein in Vienna and fell in love with the old imperial city. Dave, a grad school colleague now living there, knows the city and its transportation system very well. We wrote Vienna Turns Again to the East for Urban Land Europe. The article gets its title from Dave's thinking on the city's strategic position.
One night I went to a party in an artist's apartment in Pilsen. It was a little basement apartment crowded with people and the guy's paintings. A dancer came from behind curtains. Stepping onto a little carpet, she went into a long, slow, strange, gyrating dance. I liked it so much I wrote Rhythm in Motion about her.
I received a journalism fellowship in '04 to traverse Europe's farm markets, but I couldn't break away til the autumn of '06. I saw cows, goats and pigs in five countries and talked to farmers who let boar eat acorns in the forest. I learned about chestnuts in Italy. I produced little journalism from the trip, just a couple essays, one called What I learned at Terra Madre, the other Local and Sacred.
Planners are now devoted to building up little cities around rail stations, and if that can be done in metro Dallas it can be done anywhere. The movement toward station density was just getting started when I wrote Suburbia Revisited.
I visited Milan in early 2002 to see the city's many historic layers and its ongoing transformation. With help from friend and interpreter Chiara Pelizzoni, we conducted interviews with planners, developers, and academics to learn about the city's place in Lombardia, in the North Italian and European economy. I wrote Postindustrial Milan for Urban Land Europe.
I visited the estate several times while working in Sâo Paulo during autumn '04 (spring in Brazil). It's a big, old coffee estate that Marcos Croce was striving to return to old organic ways of cultivating coffee. And even to improve the forest and the farm with new knowledge. I found the place fascinating and wrote Fruits of a forest farm for Américas.
A profile of a farmer that appeared in Illinois Issues, April 2003. Growing Change portrays a farmer who's struggle with nature to conserve his soil is much easier than his struggle with commodity markets.
A guest essay appearing in Illinois Issues, October 2000, in which I call for a regional dialogue on farmland, to consider farmland as land, which in those days of booming development was unlikely. I argue for farmland at the city's edges.
An article published in Planning Magazine, January 2002, corresponding with the annual planning conference, which was in Chicago that year. I summarize efforts of the many (too many) groups with their hand in the regional planning arena, in Stretching the Boundaries
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