by ronb | Nov 30, 2022 | History
Why was Pittsburgh selected as one of three focus cities for the opening episodes when we were already featuring Philadelphia? With Philly and LA covering both coasts, we wanted a Rust Belt or midwestern metropolis to round out our stories and Pittsburgh perfectly fit...
by ronb | Nov 16, 2022 | History
The City Beautiful movement, popularized by the gleaming White City of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, made our cities more beautiful, but did it make them more livable? With poverty and pollution overwhelming cities in the late 19th century, the City Beautiful was...
by ronb | Nov 2, 2022 | History
As a contrast with historic Philadelphia and industrial Pittsburgh, we chose to highlight the evolution of Los Angeles in our opening episodes because the sprawling, multi-centric metropolis has pretty much defined urban growth in the 20th and now 21st centuries. LA...
by ronb | Oct 19, 2022 | Solutions
Will San Francisco’s downtown adjacent Mission Bay neighborhood finally see the school that was promised almost 25 years ago now that hundreds of once hopeful families have fled the city due to the school board’s failure to act? It’s a topic we covered in a preview...
by ronb | Oct 5, 2022 | History
Why did we film so much in Philadelphia for our first two episodes now being edited that trace the evolution of North American cities from the turn of the 19th century through today? If one had a checklist of all the things cities have tried to remake themselves,...
