At City Observatory, we’ve come the conclusion that every city has its own unique characteristics that both define its identity and which play a key role in shaping its economic opportunities. These distinctive traits don’t
Understanding Your City’s Distinctiveness Through Occupational Data Read Post »
Guest Commentary by Carol Coletta It’s a glorious moment to be in the business of promoting the built environment. I use “built environment” to encompass the way we build our buildings, arrange our neighborhoods and
How we build our cities: What’s at stake Read Post »
We recently released our latest report, Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty–not gentrification–is our biggest urban challenge. It speaks to a national trend that’s been largely ignored– that urban poor
Is your city or neighborhood poorer than 40 years ago? Read Post »
In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam popularized the term “social capital.” Putnam also developed a clever series of statistics for measuring social capital. He looked at survey data about interpersonal trust (can most people
Anti-Social Capital? Read Post »
Every city has its own unique characteristics. We know that industrial and occupational specializations can be measured using standard economic tools like location quotients. But some of the more intangible characteristics of cities are harder
How distinct is your city? Read Post »
Gentrification and neighborhood changes are hotly contested subjects. In the past few years some very thoughtful and provocative work has been done that helps shed light on these issues. Here we offer ten more of
Ten More you should read about Gentrification, Integration and Concentrated Poverty Read Post »
