There are few more powerful questions than, “Where are you from” or “Where do you live?” People feel intensely connected to cities as places and to other people who feel that same connection. In other words, people tend to understand and experience place very personally. Yet to understand place —…

As the name of my new book of essays, Place And Prosperity, suggests, I have always believed that place and prosperity are deeply intertwined. A city or town probably won’t be prosperous unless it has lots of place amenities — things that draw people to the location like parks, good…

I am on the edge. Not emotionally or psychologically — although this could be the case — but literally, physically, spatially, geographically. As I write this, I am sitting on the balcony of a hotel room in Miami Beach, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Behind me is the whole State of…

I got back on the bus yesterday. And it was fine. It had been 13 months since I road a bus or a train. Ironically — or, to be more accurate, dangerously — the last time I rode on a public transit vehicle was a New York City subway from…

More than 60 years ago, my parents and other townspeople in the small factory city of Auburn, New York, went down to the local ballpark and removed rocks from the field so the town could have a baseball team in the Class A New York-Pennsylvania League. Since then, major-league affiliations…

Sitting here in central Houston this week, with no water, spotty internet, and the looming fear that we would lose power and heat, I kept thinking about John Snow. John Snow, for those of you who aren’t up on your urban history, was the guy who solved the mystery of…

From the hills behind the City Hall in my adopted hometown of Ventura, California, it’s less than 1,000 yards southward to the Pacific Ocean. It’s a constrained piece of topography that, as I have written elsewhere, creates a small urban gem of a downtown: streetscapes, restaurants, stores, offices, residences, parking…

I’ve published a lot of writing in my life, but nothing has ever compared with the outpouring of responses I got to my Medium essay, “Why I Always Associate ‘Born To Run’ With Houston”. Both music and place are powerful drivers of emotional connection, and I guess that’s what makes…

You’ve heard that old cliché that you can always remember where you were when you first heard of a favorite song. …