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The World\u2019s Best Design Cities 2017<\/strong><\/a> (Metropolis) “The crowds coursing down Via Tortona\u00a0or gathering outside Bar Basso for one week in April are no more than a memory when the city is deserted in August. For years, it was also\u00a0a city of extreme traditionalism: The Salone del Mobile\u2019s gravitational pull on innovative international designers seemed to have little enduring influence on the native design culture. The Triennale hardly helped matters, producing devotional homages to the maestri of midcentury design rather than celebrating new talents. Today, however, Milan is slowly being catalyzed as a design city through interdisciplinarity, a powerful force that was suppressed here and elsewhere through the professionalization of the industry.”<\/p>\n Montrealer sole resident of condo building after other units rented on Airbnb<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(Andrea Bellemare, CBC News) “Chapman was a former Airbnb host himself, but decided to stop listing his home after his girlfriend moved in.” As someone who shared the article put it, “That was my facorite J.G. Ballard novel.”<\/p>\n To Attract Riders, Call Transit \u2018Congestion Free\u2019<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(Jarrett Walker, Citylab) “In most cities, rail is protected from traffic but buses aren\u2019t, so the average person\u2019s concept of buses includes being stuck in traffic. But being stuck in traffic has nothing to do with whether you\u2019re on rails or tires. Many old streetcar lines (and most new ones in the U.S.) are mixed with car traffic and suffer frequent disruption as a result. Meanwhile, buses can be highly reliable where they are protected from traffic, as in the best Bus Rapid Transit systems. Talking about a ‘congestion-free network’ is an excellent way to get people past this confusion.” See also my interview with Jarrett Walker<\/a> on\u00a0Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/em>.<\/p>\n Goodbye Highways<\/strong><\/a> (Nate Berg, Landscape Architecture) “The growing number of freeway-focused projects represent a new era of thinking about all the space we\u2019ve ceded to high-speed transportation. These projects\u2014both under construction and in the planning process\u2014are showing how to reimagine parts of the urban environment that are too easily ignored. These largely infrastructural spaces can serve more than one purpose. With some creativity and a bit of risk taking, cities can recast their freeway landscapes to play a bigger role in meeting their needs.”<\/p>\n