John Kaehny has written and successfully lobbied for the passage of state and New York City laws related to government transparency and accountability, including the first open data law in the world in 2012.
The original intent of pilotis was to create a sense of lightness that would allow circulation and light to flow beneath a structure, but contemporary requirements render thin columns insufficient for large-scale civic projects.
"This project is symbolic of what we've done over the last 12 years, reshaping the streets and the city," Christophe Najovski, the city's deputy mayor in charge of green spaces, stated during the opening ceremony.
Through Community Facilities Districts (CFD), Municipal Utility Districts (MUD), Public Improvement Districts (PID), Community Development Districts (CDD) and reimbursement districts (RD), builders can potentially shift infrastructure costs off their balance sheets and onto special districts that homebuyers ultimately absorb through property taxes without potentially adding debt to the builder's books.
Campaigner Aysha Hawcutt stated that residents were 'not anti-homes', but believed the Adlington plan was 'the wrong proposal in the wrong place'. She expressed pride in the community's resilience against the development threats.
It's like, 'Ok, where? Who do we call? What do you mean?' said Batan, of the Queensboro Dance Festival, which puts on free dance performances, parties, and classes 30 to 40 times each summer. Batan compares the city's complex permitting process - which features an alphabet-soup array of agencies and offices that set guidelines for everything from block parties and street festivals to the use of stages, tents, and speakers - to 'avoiding a bunch of trap doors.'
First Interstate Mortgage Co.'s income property division has arranged a $2.3-million construction loan and $2.6-million permanent loan for the rehabilitation of an existing three-story building in Pasadena, located at 95 N. Marengo St.
Every city contains two transportation systems. One is the visible network of roads, rail lines, sidewalks, and bus routes mapped in planning documents. The other is the invisible geography of privilege and exclusion embedded within it: the neighborhoods that received highways instead of parks, the communities whose bus routes were cut, the sidewalks that abruptly end at the edge of a district.
Sarah Lambert took her usual morning swim for 40 minutes off Exmouth town beach before her volunteer shift helping disabled people get access to the water. A wheelchair user herself, Lambert's regular sea swims twice a week between the lifeboat station and HeyDays restaurant were the perfect form of exercise for her disability.
Understanding the difference in purpose Unlike private businesses, which exist to make a profit, public institutions are designed to create impact - especially social and economic outcomes that benefit everyone, not just paying customers. A public agency doesn't measure its success in revenue or margins, but in how much it improves lives, builds equity and maintains public trust. This doesn't mean budgets and spending don't matter - they absolutely do - but money is not the goal. It's the tool.
When routes are well organized, there are clear directional signs, and speed limits become reasonable. The early installation of warning signs allows transport companies to plan deliveries more accurately and avoid delays. For businesses, time is money. When a truck carrying goods does not spend hours detouring due to an unclear traffic scheme or stuck in traffic where it could have been avoided thanks to competent traffic management, fuel costs, driver wages, and vehicle maintenance costs are reduced.
Berkeley has awarded tens of millions of dollars in contracts that weren't subjected to a competitive bid process, according to a new report, which could lead to the city paying too much for goods and services, or create opportunities for corruption. The investigation by the office of City Auditor Jenny Wong found Berkeley often used non-competitive contracts in cases where it should have solicited for other bids, including in two deals for recycling services worth a combined $41.4 million, which are up for extensions soon.
City law requires the council to approve all contracts above $250,000. But Oakland's city administrator, Jestin Johnson, has the power to issue contracts up to that amount without informing the council and the public. The mandatory annual report is meant to provide transparency into these purchases. The report also requires Johnson and his team to explain if any contracts were issued without a competitive bidding process, and how many awards went to local businesses.
Public space is often understood as belonging to no one in particular, collectively accessible yet institutionally maintained, yet a growing number of initiatives are challenging this assumption by testing shared management and distributed ownership models. In Paris, Adoptez un banc introduces a sponsorship-based approach, allowing individuals and groups to support temporarily and symbolically claim responsibility for historic public furniture without compromising its collective use.
Jane Jacobs was also one of the voices that challenged this predominantly rationalist logic, arguing that truly vibrant streets are those capable of sustaining the diversity of everyday life, its informal exchanges, and the forms of care and natural surveillance that emerge from them. What these authors share is a fundamental insight: streets are not merely infrastructures for circulation, but social ecosystems, shaped by the relationships, uses, and encounters that take place within them.
If your partner in Munich mishandles customer data, or your reseller in Paris uses a "black box" AI tool to generate deceptive ads, it isn't just their reputation on the line. It's yours. With the EU AI Act now in full swing and GDPR entering its "mature enforcement" era, the distance between a partner's mistake and your company's $20 million fine has never been shorter.
The current issue is whether Fremont controls the road that the Alameda County Board of Supervisors ceded to Christopher George, who has now blocked access with a gate. But it is part of a longer battle that has included the board considering George's request for the land after his company donated $10,000 to Supervisor David Haubert's campaign. The board granted his request ostensibly to save maintenance costs, but at the expense of constituents who have used that section of road recreationally for decades.
It's tempting to frame autonomous driving as a single leap. In public transport, adoption tends to be incremental - because the system is built for reliability, and new capabilities have to fit into daily operations without disrupting service. That is why a practical strategy is evolution, not revolution: introduce autonomy in a defined domain, learn safely in real operations, and expand capability step-by-step.
Cedar Street just came out victorious in a multi-year saga with the city of La Canada Flintridge, winning the first successful builder's remedy case in California Superior Court for its 80-unit mixed-use project at 600 Foothill Boulevard and setting a path for other developers to build. But the fight may have left its scars, in time, stress and now soured relationships with some officials.
Cities around the world share a common goal: to become healthier and greener, supported by civic infrastructure that restores ecosystems and strengthens public life. The question is how to reach this. Global climate targets, local building codes, and municipal standards increasingly guide designers and planners toward better choices. Still, many cities struggle to translate these frameworks into everyday, street-level comfort and long-term ecological protection.
Though they're individually tiny, parking spots quietly play a dominant role in shaping urban landscapes. Most US cities dedicate at least 25% of their developable land to them. Some, even more. That land usage doesn't only determine the way a city looks. It also means covering large swathes of urban areas in heat-absorbing asphalt, which contributes to making summers hotter and heightens the risk of flooding since it prevents drainage during storms and heavy rainfall.
Between the lines: This isn't benevolence. It's customer acquisition. Mayors don't just buy "AI." They buy cloud, data modernization, cybersecurity, services, and long-term support - the tech stack underneath any serious deployment. In return, cities get tools that could fix long-standing challenges, Cris Turner, vice president of government affairs at Google told Axios last June when it first released its playbook.
The new "abundance" agenda can deliver a wealth of equitable transportation options - but only if its proponents recognize how our glut of highways has contributed to the "scarcity" they say they hope to tackle, advocates are saying.Inspired by the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book of the same name, "abundance" became a political buzzword across America in 2025, inspiring a universe of think-pieces and justification for a raft of deregulatory policy proposals.
GSA also wants information on factors that drive the range of markups such as volume, product category, support levels and business size. The questions also wants to know if sourcing hardware through a distributor versus directly with the OEM drives variations in the markups. GSA wants to identify ways to reduce the cost on items that are not purchased directly from OEMs.
Mayor Mamdani swept into Gracie Mansion on the promise of ending widespread corruption around policing and street safety. He can do both by laser-focusing his efforts on eliminating the prevalent abuse and forgery of parking placards. Mamdani has a rare chance to permanently halt this dangerous and criminal practice, and, in doing so, radically alter the balance of power in New York City. For the past decade, under the handle @placardabuse, we've documented how a large contingent of car drivers misuse their parking privileges -
DOT's rules brought those establishments under the umbrella of the city's "long-term" and "short-term" concession regulations. The short-term concessions allow outdoor vendors to operate a max of 29 days out of the year. The long-term concession takes about a year to get set up. That would appear to leave restaurateurs on a handful of open streets shit-out-of-luck, including the so-called Dimes Square on Canal Street, which had planned to operate for 183 days this year.
