amanda kolson hurley

Floating Cities Aren’t the Answer to Climate Change UN-Habitat is looking at high-tech urban islands as a potential survival fix for communities at risk from rising seas. This isn’t what resilience looks like. CityLab, April 10, 2019 Last week, at a roundtable at the United Nations headquarters in New York, a Tahitian entrepreneur named Marc […]

The Secret History of the Suburbs We all know the stereotypes: Suburbia is dull, conformist, and about “keeping up with the Joneses.” But what about the suburbs of utopians and renegades? CityLab, April 9, 2019 Back in the early 1960s, Malvina Reynolds wrote a song called “Little Boxes,” inspired by a drive past rows of lookalike pastel-hued […]

America’s Management of Urban Forests Has Room for Improvement A new survey finds that urban forests could benefit from better data on climate change and pests and a focus on social equity. CityLab, March 25, 2019 Forested areas in cities may seem best left untouched, but it’s a common misconception that they can take care […]

Understanding the New Mormon Temple in Rome Despite its olive trees and piazza, the new temple will look familiar to American eyes. CityLab, March 21, 2019 There are more than 900 churches in Rome, many of them jaw-droppingly beautiful inside, like the Sistine Chapel and Santa Maria in Trastevere. The Eternal City’s newest religious structure doesn’t […]

How the Green New Deal Could Retrofit Suburbs The original New Deal included a bold attempt to rethink suburbia. We can still learn from it. CityLab, Feb. 11, 2019 Last week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced a resolution that gives the heady vision of the “Green New Deal” some broad policy outlines—although the specifics […]