Frank Gruber

The American Planning Association (APA) held its annual National Planning Conference at the Convention Center in downtown Los Angeles from Saturday, April 14 through Tuesday the 17th. This made it easy for me to attend, since I live in Santa Monica, part of "L.A.," if not part of "Los Angeles,...

I write a weekly column about life and politics in Santa Monica, California, for a news website that covers the city. This week our city on the bay feels like ground zero in the culture wars, or at least in the fantasy-league "War on Christmas." That's because a group of...

On Sunday, Oct. 9, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez took the City of Los Angeles to task for subsidizing the move of the Gensler architectural firm from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles. In addition to the three-year tax holiday Los Angeles gives all relocating businesses, city...

In August I posted an essay on Huffington Post asking the question why, as opposed to how, America destroyed its great cities in the second half of the 20th century. I listed various "suspects," including the impact of the automobile, as the automobile was certainly one of the means by...

In June I concluded several articles about the legacy of Jane Jacobs with the question, "Why did America destroy its cities?"

What I was referring to was the catastrophe that befell America's great cities in the decades after World War II. How do we explain that Detroit lost two-thirds...

The final essay in Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, the book that I have been reviewing now in several installments, is about the impact Jane Jacobs had on the planning profession. It's not a pretty picture. In the essay, entitled "Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning," Thomas J....

The starting point for "Jane Jacobs, Andy Warhol, and the Kind of Problem a Community Is," an essay by book co-editor Timothy Mennel in Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, the book that I've already written two posts about, is an intriguing historical coincidence: that 1961 was the year when Jane...

As discussed in Part 1 of my review of Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, the book published by the American Planning Association to mark the 50 year after publication of The Death and Life Great American Cities, the latter three essays in the book analyze, critically, the impact that Jane Jacobs has...

In the introduction to Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, a new book from the American Planning Association, co-editor Max Page writes that the book "is less about Jane Jacobs as an individual than about 'Jane Jacobs' as the shorthand for a set of ideas and planning practices that have spread around the...

The Language of Towns and Cities: A Visual Dictionary, by Dhiru A. Thadani (with help from about 50 contributors), is an oddly personal work. I say "oddly," because the book's title invokes that most characteristically objective of all books, the dictionary, and the book's format resembles that of an encyclopedia,...

In Part One of this two-part review of Contemporary Urbanism in Brazil: Beyond Brasília, edited by Vicente del Rio and William Siembieda, I discussed how right-wing authoritarian regimes in Brazil had, as recounted in the book, adopted wholesale the principles of modernist urbanism, but that when the military...

I have always wanted to visit Brazil, but after reading Contemporary Urbanism in Brazil: Beyond Brasília I am discouraged about doing so. What once might have been a quick trip, perhaps an eco-tourism tour on the Amazon followed by a few days in Rio, would now need to be an...

When Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the flood control system destroyed New Orleans the event became a lens through which to examine the continuing fundamental dysfunctions of America 400 years after European colonization.

If that statement seems an exaggeration, consider these factors that combined to destroy a great city:

In the three articles I have written for Huff Post in response to the book Urban Design what I have been arguing against is not the need to plan cities, nor the importance of good urban architecture, but the notion that the city not only can be "designed," but also...

This is Part Three of my review of Urban Design, the book of essays edited by Alex Krieger and William Saunders. (The review is now turning into an extended essay inspired by the book, as a Part Four is in now the works.) I'm writing this part to respond to...

A few weeks ago, I concluded Part One of this review of the book Urban Design (edited by Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders) by referring to Joan Busquets' brief contribution to the book in which he cited ten eclectic "contemporary approaches" to urbanism to illustrate the viability of urban...

Urban Design is a book published last year, but it is a collection of 18 essays that Harvard Design Magazine (HDM) published in 2006-07 to mark the 50th anniversary of a fabled conference on urban design that took place at Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1956. This conference...

It's been a while, but as I wrote in April when I was in New Orleans for the annual conference of the American Planning Association, I found two themes resonating through the conference: "sustainable urbanism," which I discussed in my last article for Huff Post, and "what to do with...

I am writing this from New Orleans where I have been attending the annual conference of the American Planning Association (APA). It's also been for me a voyage of discovery, because I had never been to the Crescent City before. The fact that my first visit here comes five years...

From its title one expects that Foreclosing the Dream: How America's Housing Crisis is Reshaping our Cities and Suburbs, the new book from William H. Lucy, professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, will be about the impact of the mortgage foreclosure crisis on the pattern...