Recent Posts by Thomas
Surprising many in the architectural community, this year’s prestigious Pritzker Prize went to Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena. Though the award—often regarded as the Nobel Prize of architecture—prompts images of iconic skyscrapers or cultural centers, Aravena initially achieved fame for his firm’s ...
Although Lima’s Villa El Salvador neighborhood was just a dusty plain called the Tablada de Lurín in 1971, it would soon become home to some of the city’s poorest residents. At the time, there were no electricity lines, no wells, ...
In January, 2013, a city emerged on the banks of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in Allahabad, India. Temporary bamboo and fabric structures appeared on a floodplain that had been underwater just weeks before. Metal plates were laid down for ...
Consensus is building around the many benefits of compact cities. Overall, compact cities use fewer resources, produce fewer carbon emissions, and provide better quality of life for their inhabitants than their sprawled counterparts. In rapidly urbanizing countries in the global ...
The informal economy is often referred to as the “shadow economy,” a glaring indicator of its absence from the eyes of policymakers. As discussed on TheCityFix, street vendors are frequently ignored in surveys of jobs and economic productivity, despite their ...
As previously discussed on TheCityFix, informal street vendors in cities around the world experience daily challenges to their economic livelihoods. For example, street vendors are perceived to be detrimental to city life, unhygienic, noisy, and to obstruct smooth flow of ...
As previously discussed on TheCityFix, many cities worldwide are facing a series of challenges around informal economic activity. As they begin to modernize and transform public spaces, street vendors are often left behind or swept away. Yet, these efforts at ...
There is an entire ecosystem of informal commerce along Bogotá, Colombia’s streets. Some vendors sit at traffic signals or bus stops, waiting for a bus that’s not too full and not too empty. When they spot a good candidate, they ...
Rapidly developing cities worldwide, while diverse, have a number of factors in common. Issues that seem nearly universal are congestion and enormous traffic jams, which have, in some extreme cases, stretched the typical commute into a weeklong sojourn. While cities ...
