Brad Plumer has a nice post on the proposed DC "Purple Line" that does a good job illuminating some of the more current challenges for urbanism. Namely, what we need to do is not simply create more cities, but to "citify" more suburbs. As Brad notes, "The logic undergirding the Purple Line is that D.C.'s Metro, like most old-school subways, is a hub-and-spoke model, built for an era when people lived in the suburbs and commuted downtown for work. Nowadays, though, most traffic flows from suburb to suburb." That sort of logic extends much farther than DC. Too often, urbanism is set up as a stark choice between living like a New Yorker and living like a Montanan, but the reality is that we have a built landscape to deal with, and reforms are going to be matters of degree, of taking the best practices of one type of place and figuring out if they're applicable to another type of place. Subways are a nice example. They work well in cities, but they can also work well in relatively dense suburbs that have clearly articulated commuting patterns. THE PURPLE LINE.
Brad Plumer has a nice post on the proposed DC "Purple Line" that does a good job illuminating some of the more current challenges for urbanism. Namely, what we need to do is not simply create more cities, but to "citify" more suburbs. As Brad notes, "The logic undergirding the Purple Line is that D.C.'s Metro, like most old-school subways, is a hub-and-spoke model, built for an era when people lived in the suburbs and commuted downtown for work. Nowadays, though, most traffic flows from suburb to suburb." That sort of logic extends much farther than DC. Too often, urbanism is set up as a stark choice between living like a New Yorker and living like a Montanan, but the reality is that we have a built landscape to deal with, and reforms are going to be matters of degree, of taking the best practices of one type of place and figuring out if they're applicable to another type of place. Subways are a nice example. They work well in cities, but they can also work well in relatively dense suburbs that have clearly articulated commuting patterns. 
