Luxury Urban Apartment Bubble About to Burst?

Joel Kotkin argues that all the high-rise luxury apartment growth in downtowns like New York, the Bay Area and Miami are built on a myth -- that retiring American seniors are heading there.

New Uses for Office Space Surging

As the Net transforms where and how we work, the demand for office space, predictably, is lagging. Enterprising developers are looking for new uses -- even for brand new office space that is not filling up.

Collapse of Office Market in Places Not Good For F2F

Santa-Fe-ing of the World Update: As predicted, the more time we spend in front of our screens, the more premium we put on F2F contact.

An Intentionally Inclusive Detroit Edge City

Southfield, Michigan -- the prototypical Detroit Edge City, with a staggering 27 million feet of office and the motto "The Center of It All" -- intentionally made itself multiethnic and inclusive. Now affluent, educated blacks are in the majority.

Shockingly Empty Chinese Edge Cities

Sixty Minutes tours millions of square feet and miles of high-end emptiness all over the country, saying this is a bubble that could take down the Chinese economy

An Edge City in Ethiopia

Of all places. But hey, Addis Abeba is growing fast, and sure enough, the greatest activity is in the Bole District, which includes Bole International Airport.

Surprising Study of Phoenix Area Edge Cities

In a slide show, Daniel J. Christen shares a study of the Phoenix area he started in grad school. Joel is not familiar with his numbers methodology. But if true, the most startling aspect is the growth of the Scottsdale Airport Edge City -- coming out of essentially nowhere when Joel published in 1991 -- to become the biggest Edge City in the entire region.

The Stuff Coming to Us in Ways That Transform Cities

We are in the middle of a freight revolution that is transforming the built environment. Instead of us needing to go to the stuff (traditional retail), the stuff is increasingly coming to us (Santa Claus now comes in a Big Brown truck).

Santa-Fe-ing Dispersed Concentration as the New Normal

Joel's "Santa Fe-ing Effect," in which the future of cities seems to be a technology-enabled drive toward dispersed, nicer and smaller places that are great at creating face-to-face contact, is noted by Witold Rybczynski in Slate.

Las Vegas as an Exemplar of the Santa-Fe-ing Phenom

The New Yorker has an excellent piece describing how, in the age of advanced communications and rapid global delivery of anything, cities can now rise anywhere people choose to congregate. It masquerades as a piece about how haute cuisine is possible in Las Vegas. (A plane lands there every three minutes.

Santa Fe-ing of the World, Part Two

This is part two of the NewGeography piece, in which Joel discusses how information technology is also reshaping the non-affluent parts of the globe.

Santa Fe-ing of the World, Part One

NewGeography published a two-part piece by Joel on his latest major update of Edge City, about how information technology is reshaping cities as thoroughly as did the automobile, and faster. This is Part One.

Edge City Contributing to Drop in Male Employment?

Mother Jones magazine asks the question.