My interest in urbanism and city planning is something that I’ve always had, but not always had the vocabulary to articulate. When I was a kid, I would play Minecraft a lot, and would design palaces to my heart’s content. When I was in seventh grade, I designed my first city for art class. I called it Io, and built skyscrapers made of gold and silver (I was very happy to have found gold and silver colored pencils). I was very proud of my city, although it lacked a lot of services that all real cities should have, water treatment facilities for instance. But still the idea of creating a utopia, where all people could live their best lives proved very alluring to me.
My family was fortunate enough that I was able to travel overseas and explore many different types of living, from the very rural to the very urban. When I was abroad, I noticed some very noticeable differences between the quality of lives of the people compared to those in the US, and I started to realize this was due to the design of their cities. What I also came to appreciate was that their urban design was not just due to size differences in the countries or differing population densities (reasons that you often hear), but to conscious design choices undertaken by humans.
The more I learned about cities in the US, the more I grew to detest their layout and their design (which oftentimes is fairly recent and the result of racist policies, like red-lining and exclusionary zoning). In this section of my website, I hope to explore the idea of redesigning American cities and towns, and share core principles of what I believe all good cities should have.