Alfred Twu, an artist and architect who works on housing and transportation projects, wrote a guest post for Noah Smith’s newsletter with lots of interesting views on the evolution of cities. It’s mostly a sequence of statements of a few paragraphs, so a bit hard to summarise, but here are some outtakes to encourage you to read through, plus there are quite a few of his illustrations spread out along his writing. Twu wrote about renovation, the economy, lifestyle, shopping, colleges, transportation, and dreams.

This blog post ends up being a synthesis of a synthesis, so you might want to click through to the article explaining seven major transformations to solve urban inequality, or even to the World Resources Report Towards a More Equal City. But here are some of the highlights.

We’ve already written about cities for children. Now, following a similar line of thought, architecture firm Arup have release a new report, Cities Alive: Designing Cities that work for women. The basic argument for both is roughly the same: cities are designed for white men going to work. That’s a great oversimplification on my part but broadly correct as a center point to multiple issue. If we design cities for a broader range of people, more of them will be comfortable, be able to safely do a greater number of things within cities, and everyone will benefit.

Earlier this year, Open Future published their views concerning a public data commons and presented it as a public-interest framework for B2G (Business to Government) data sharing in the European Data Act. It is quite a long read and might seem somewhat incongruous to a blog about fab cities, but it’s an important issue well covered here. Important because, regardless of which visions or ideals one promotes for cities (and society more broadly) everything is more and more digital. What’s digital produces data. Data is easy enough to collect and can be assembled as insights and knowledge. Who controls it matters. A lot.

There’s a repeating theme I’ve noticed over the last few years’ worth of changes in various cities, something that might be called the “oh, wait” moment. An old, old one we’ve mentioned before is the sidewalk curb-side “notch” which was originally popularized after the second world war when there was a surge of people in crutches and wheel chairs who needed sidewalks to be more accessible but oh, wait… it’s also proven super useful for the elderly and for parents pushing strollers. Recently it’s increased bike paths and pedestrian streets to give people some room during the pandemic but oh, wait… it’s actually appreciated year-long and not only good for active mobility but also for the business of surrounding cafes, restaurants and shops.