+Holm says that what he realized then was that continuity mattered. "And that was not what we were taught in any architecture school courses. We would look at these old buildings and ask our instructors, 'Well, why can't we do something like that?' and they'd say, 'Well, you can't do that anymore!" A Modernist architect discusses why we can't have nice buildings anymore.
+Planetizen has the 100 best books written about city making ever. I was surprised Geography of Nowhere and Suburban Nation were so low, but if you check the comments, the author has agreed with the mob and decided that those two books should be higher.
+While the subject of this article is actually the apex of neoliberal shock doctrine politics (i.e. manufacturing a crisis in order to make money off the solution...in this case the West producing the lion's share of carbon that causes Climate Change, and then making money off the mitigation in poor countries), I think at its heart there is truth here. Some of the purest entrepreneurial opportunities available right now are finding innovative ways to distribute resources more efficiently and help people deal with the consequences of centuries of environmental neglect. I gravitate toward housing concerns, personally, but water, food, and safety are three important areas of opportunity.
+Oldie but a goodie: When Abbot John de Sais laid the first stone of a church in a tiny central England town in 1118, he set in motion a construction project that would culminate in 1237 with the completion of Peterborough Cathedral -- the grandest structure in England at the time and a harbinger of the Gothic style that came to define British architecture for the next 500 years. De Sais was long dead before the project was complete, but that didn't stop him. Fast-forward to the US housing bubble of 2008. Developers built McMansions for speculation. Brokers bundled house values into mortgage-backed securities that they could trade in a nanosecond. Sprawl ensued and build quality was poor. Eventually the bubble burst, prices declined, and now we are left with foreclosed homes that nobody wants. So what changed in western culture between 1118 and 2008? How did we go from building grand cathedrals to McMansions? Forget short-termism: it's time to think longpath.