Suburbia in Albuquerque, NM by Duncan Rawlinson licensed under Creative Commons.

Eight experts weigh in on how to move suburbia into the 21st century. Paris has succesfully reduced driving, and now it has to deal with rising Metro ridership. Transportation equity should be at the forefront of planning, a U of Toronto Scarborough researcher says.

Manifesto for a new suburbia: Curbed consults eight experts on how to rethink suburbia for the 21st century. From rethinking rules around lawns to repurposing dead malls and streamlining regional cooperatives to combat suburban poverty, there’s a lot to be done to bring suburbs into the future. (Alissa Walker | Curbed)

Paris seeks to accommodate a booming Metro ridership: Metro ridership in Paris has experienced five consecutive years of growth. Now the city is looking for a workaround to deal with the congestion on Metro. This issue came about because Paris spends a good amount of time discouraging car use in its city core, which has been successful. (Feargus O’Sullivan |City Lab)

What does transportation equity mean? Steve Farber, assistant professor of human geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough, researches the social and economic outcomes of transport use in urban areas. He recently helped host Mobilizing Justice, a two-day workshop exploring the role of equity in transportation planning. Social justice, he notes, is rarely considered in the planning process, and socioeconomic impacts tend to be addressed only after a project is implemented. (Don Campbell | U of T News)

How Europe’s megacities soaked up wealth: The shift from an industrial to a service-oriented economy is hitting Europe hard. Between 1980 and 1995, industrial output in Paris fell by €5.5B, but the services sector grew by €20B. Milan is one of the many cities now centered on finance, tech, design, and innovation, but the city continues to prosper while the rest of the Italian economy stagnates. (Julian Coman | The Guardian)

An indigenous developer resists Vancouver’s zoning: The Squamish Nation was displaced from land near downtown Vancouver in the early 1900s, but won back five hectares of that land in the early 2000s. They recently partnered with developer Westbank to plan 11 towers on that land, the tallest of which would be 56 stories, with 80% of the land dedicated to public space. (Editorial | The Globe and Mail)

New urbanism, plucked from the garden: In the German city of Heilbronn, 80 gray acres of railyards and warehouses lined the Neckar River. For the past 10 years, as the need for industrial lands diminishes, landscape architect and urban planner Oliver Toellner has been transforming this large industrial plot into a new park and urban district for 3,500 residents and 1,000 jobs. (Nate Berg | Landscape Architecture Magazine)

Quote of the Week

“None of us knew anything about banking to begin with, but we haven’t let Wall Street gaslight us into thinking that this is impossible. North Dakota showed a hundred years ago that it was possible, and they did it without fintech, they did it as grain farmers in arguably a very difficult era.”

Jacqueline Fielder in Next City discussing the potential for a publicly-owned bank in San Francisco.

This week on the podcast, Steven Higashide discusses his new book Better Buses: Better Cities.