Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis

Politics & Social Sciences

Condon, Patrick

Social Sciences

University of British Columbia Press

Land use patterns and urban form can strongly impact an urban community’s contribution to global climate change through the production of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Key contributors to a city’s climate footprint include the physical arrangement of streets and public transportation infrastructure, building types, and land uses that influence both vehicle use and energy consumption in buildings.
City and regional officials now facing new greenhouse gas emissions reduction requirements are increasingly turning to urban design as a key component of climate change mitigation. But implementing an urban planning strategy that includes effective climate change mitigation techniques requires decision support tools that illustrate the GHG implications of land use and transportation options. While a wide spectrum of environmental urban planning tools currently exists, few have the capacity to work simultaneously at both the regional and local scale, or to capture both building performance and transportation demand analysis.
This report reviews existing tools that help urban planners address climate change mitigation, analyzing the tools’ scope, scale, methodology, and policy support, and presents four case studies illustrating how existing tools at various stages of development have been used.

Urban Planning Tools for Climate Change Mitigation (Policy Focus Reports)

Miller, Nicole

Cavens, Duncan

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

The book is an engaging primer about how to make cities more socially resilient. The book features a conversational 3 part Graphic Novella, and companion 5 part Essay, describing why and how zoning tools can help solve Vancouver's affordable housing crises in a way that is relevant for other jurisdictions. Historical observations are provided to understand more deeply about what underpins today's challenges. The book also serves as a monograph of strategic drawings that reminds readers of the important work of the City's Urban Design Studio 2004-2014, a seminal and creative period in the city's Urban Design history. The book concludes with lessons on Urban Design Leadership and why humor is important for public discourse. The book is intended for a wide audience and is written in simple language sprinkled with wordplay and contemporary references.

Zoning Must Evolve: You Forgot About Me

Comics & Graphic Novels

Hein, Scot

Manga

lulu.com

Sick City is a call to action prompted by the crisis that crippled our cities, the pandemic. But the pandemic has brought the issues of race, inequality and unaffordability to the forefront as well, illustrating how all of these ills can be traced to unequal access to urban land. Patrick Condon walks the reader through that history, proving that most of these problems are rooted in the inflation of urban land value — land that is no longer priced for its value for housing but as an asset class in a global market hungry for assets of all kinds. The American wage earner who is most affected by COVID is also the worst hit by the surging price of urban land which has made the essential commodity of housing increasingly inaccessible. Not only does Condon dive deep into myriad and credible references to prove these points, but he also wraps up the conversation with some eminently practical and widely precedented policy actions that municipalities can enact — policy tools to establish housing justice at the same time slow the flow of land value increases into the pockets of land speculators.

Sick City: Disease, Race, Inequality and Urban Land

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Diseases & Physical Ailments

James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Liveable Environments

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Books by Condon, Patrick