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Category Archives: This Week’s City Reading

This week’s city reading: Apple’s sucky campus, Seoul’s “Neo-Brutalism,” what happens at SCI-ARC, the hotel theory of Los Angeles

If You Care About Cities, Apple’s New Campus Sucks (Adam Rogers, Wired) “Apple’s new HQ is a retrograde, literally inward-looking building with contempt for the city where it lives and cities in general. People rightly credit Apple for defining the look and feel of the future; its computers and phones seem like science fiction. But by building […]

This week’s city reading: Seoullo 7017 (“Seoul’s High Line”) edition

Seoul, a city ‘with no soul,’ builds its own High Line on an old overpass (Anna Fifield, The Washington Post) “Unlike the High Line, built on an old rail line on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, the walkway will connect with buildings — there are already bridges into an office tower and a hotel — and […]

This week’s city reading: the strengths and shortcomings of Los Angeles’ evolving transit system

Ridership climbs, planning efforts lag as Expo Line extension marks first birthday (Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times) “The plan as it now reads doesn’t go far enough in allowing new density near the Expo Line; it is too timid for a city and region that have systematically underbuilt housing for more than three decades. To […]

This week’s city reading: Habitat 67’s concrete, MacArthur Park’s non-gentrification, and the 2nd Ave. Subway’s Comfiness

Growing Up in a Concrete Masterpiece (Blake Gopnik, New York Times) “‘How do you live with all that cement,’ my schoolmates would ask. ‘With delight’ was the only answer. They understood once they visited.” This provides as good an opportunity any to quote (past Notebook on Cities and Culture guest) Jonathan Meades: The destruction of Brutalist […]