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Articles by Nate Berg

Nate Berg is assistant editor of the urban planning news website Planetizen (http://www.planetizen.com).

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This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community.

Traffic is essentially “an engineering issue,” says author Tom Vanderbilt. “But there’s also a layer of culture.”

That layer of culture determines, to a large extent, how traffic can become a problem. This idea is explored in Vanderbilt’s 2008 book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), a Planetizen Top Book of the year. He recently expanded on that idea for a discussion about traffic put on by Zocalo Public Square in (where better?) Los Angeles. A write-up of the event and video of the discussion with UCLA researcher Eric Morris is also available.

Tom Vanderbilt discusses his book Traffic as UCLA researcher and New York Times Freakonomics blogger Eric Morris listens.Courtesy Planetizen.comPeople in L.A. love these sorts of discussions. We’ve got a mess of a traffic problem in this city — from intense congestion to freeway domination to a late-blooming public transit system. Something about events focused on transportation and t... Read more

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  • The Informal Economy: Michael Jackson Edition

      This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. I couldn’t resist. I knew it was going to be a madhouse in downtown L.A. for Michael Jackson’s memorial service, but I had to go see what it was like — not because […]

  • Improving on the ambiguity of privately owned public spaces

    This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. Cities are filled with spaces intended for the public — but many of them are clearly owned and operated by the private sector. Though cities bend rules to get these spaces built, the public […]

  • Musings from an L.A. green-biz conference

    This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. <p>The green marketplace is the marketplace of the future. From Wal-Mart to Toyota to the neighborhood dry cleaner, it seems like every business is going out of its way to tell us how green […]

  • Greening the alleys of Los Angeles

    This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. Green alley projects are popping up in cities all over the U.S. and Canada, in an effort to make the concrete jungle a little better at absorbing rainwater. A new program in Los Angeles […]