Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

Expanding the Toronto Island Airport will undermine the downtown's economy and liveability and intensify pollution and smog from Oshawa to Oakville. I urge Torontonians to close down this dangerous Trojan horse and get on with planning constructive and delightful ways of using our magnificent lakeside assets.

There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.

The entrepreneurial investors of the time just want to repeat themselves indefinitely and don't know when to stop. You can't do that. And so finally the housing boom, or the auto boom, or whatever it is that's been carrying things along, runs out of customers.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things work but only the kind of quick, easy outer impression that they get.

Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities. My new hypothesis shows why. But also in trading with each other they can't be in too different stages of development, and they can't copy one another.