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Cities compete for the "echo-boom" generation, which isn't in love with cars or the suburbs anymore, by wooing them with bike lanes, walk scores and robust transit.  So if one reads on Trip Advisor that Baltimore isn't a city known for its efficient public transportation system. ( Trip Advisor ) alarms should go off for anybody who cares about this city's future.  Many buses but often poor service: MTA buses stuck in traffic in Baltimore (Photo: ArchPlan Inc.) In Baltimore, this verdict should actually set off a whole array of alarms. How about the equity alarm? The opportunity alarm? The congestion alarm? The economic competitiveness alarm? The equity alarm should be especially shrill given that the concentration of poverty in inner city neighborhoods has been in the news so much lately. Talk about equity quickly leads to transit as we shall see. Access and mobility are key for mitigating the inequities that arise from the sharp income disparities routinely found

Behind the clever New Yorker cover of the star spangled banner with a punched out star like the broken glass of a store front, Jelani Cobb addressed Baltimore in his column, “Talk of the Town,”  concluding that the real question raised by the recent unrest is: What should life in an American city be?    The real question is not one of police tactics: whether the use of body cameras can reduce civilian complaints or whether police-brutality cases should be handled by independent prosecutors. The real question is what life in an American city should be.     Although this question clearly reaches beyond architects and urban planners, they in particular may scratch their heads over it. Hasn't this very question already been answered? After decades of pondering, hasn’t the clear consensus emerged that the American city should follow the journalist Jane Jacobs (“Death and Life of American Cities”), not Robert Moses (the legendary New York Commissioner)? Hasn't this new consensus just

 The following article is modified from a presentation prepared for the National AIA Convention 2015 in Atlanta on May 14, titled: " Smart Cities and Innovation: Resilience, Adaptation, and Eco Districts " Cities now represent the core hubs of the global economy, acting as hives of innovation in technical, financial and other services. (A quote from a 2011 brochure titled “the new economics of Cities”)   Cities and metro regions have become the dominant human life-form, Cities are considered nimbler, easier to govern and therefore more innovative than states and countries. Many Cities have become the drivers in sustainability, in resilience, in local food production and in alternative transport. Increasingly mayors collaborate across continents such as in the Global Cities Initiative,  a five-year project that aims to help leaders in U.S. metropolitan areas reorient their economies toward greater engagement in world markets. Wood model of  Shanghai  Is big data nothing but a

Free downtown transit shuttles are popular across America. Denver has its electric mall bus, Seattle provided a fare free zone on its regular bus transit and DC runs a five line " Circulator " for which they now charge a buck. Free downtown shuttles are also run in Oakland, Nashville, Columbus , Raleigh  and even lower Manhattan, mushrooming across the nation far beyond the 40 systems counted in 2013. More are aspiring to them, such as Baltimore's suburban center Towson  which likes to model itself after Bethesda , Maryland. Do these systems make sense? Do they serve a purpose or are they gimmicks? Providing public transit on a fare-free basis for all passengers has tantalized public policymakers for decades. Proponents claim that if other public services such as schools, libraries, and parks (as well as most roads) are considered important enough to provide at no charge to the user, then providing everyone in the community with at least a basic means of mobility should a