Many things have improved in the past 30 years. Examples are the quality of digital cameras, the design of camping tents and the critical standing of comic books. Others have gotten worse, such as gasoline prices, the narrowing separation between church and state and the reputation of postmodern architecture. But - has sustainable planning gotten better or worse?

It could almost be a story from a Charles Dickens novel: Nearly 800 lower-income households find themselves evicted from an apartment complex in the Venice district of Los Angeles by developers who reportedly want to build luxury housing. The City Council opposes the deal but is defeated in court. After various attempts at mediation, the developers beckon sheriff's deputies to lock out hundreds of renters from their apartments, only to call off the authorities at the last minute. >>read more

Thesis: Cities are dynamic places, where different forces constantly push against each other. Among those many forces are the desires of local residents to maintain a "sense of place," or in some cases create that sense de novo in locations where it does not already exist. >>read more

I confess I have not read the book A Choice over Our Heads, but the resonant title of Lawrence Butler's book chimed in my brain the other day, when I first hearing about Sequoia Village. The project is an attempt to combine affordable housing and the philosophy of co-housing, a semi-communal way of living in which people agree to contribute labor, such as cooking one day for a week in exchange for communal meals the rest of the time. >>read more