Transportation is Destiny

Transportation is destiny, and cities must adapt. Demography: ditto. Bill Barnes finds digs into a pile of "big think" planning books and pulls out a number of lessons for the future.

1 minute read

April 6, 2011, 8:00 AM PDT

By Tim Halbur

Greg Lindsay's "Aerotropolis" is on the top of Barnes' stack, which posits that airport-adjacent developement is the way of the future.

Barnes writes:

"There's no room in this book for sentimentality about people and places left behind or about other strategies being carried out; no concern for community or democracy or quality of life. Just speed and access and supply chains and success."

In general, Barnes warns that "big think" books can be misleading in their confidence in what the future holds:

"There is about all these books a whiff of triumphalism, a clever certainty about what is best, about what the future holds, and about the superiority of the analysis offered. It's a hazard of the genre and can produce a bit of blindness to complexity."

Thanks to Bill Barnes

FULL STORY: Emerging Issues: Big Think books, Part Two: Cities and Destiny

Monday, April 4, 2011 in Nation's Cities Weekly

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