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Welcome - my name is Kevin Klinkenberg, and this site "The Messy City" is my blog and company website. I started blogging on urban planning and design issues in 2007, and began working in the field in 1993. Please feel free to connect with me on any of the social media sites listed here. Thanks for reading.

Suggested Reading

Friday, May 2, 2014:

James Fallows explores America's small towns and their downtowns. It's a good lead-in to this piece that I authored about their future prospects. You can purchase a print-ready version of it here.

Katie Matchett makes a great point about the chart below that's made the rounds on the internets this week, courtesy of Bill Gates:

As many of the comments on this blog post have noted, the latest figures from the World Health Organization show that last year 1.24 million people died in traffic crashes. Not only does that number trump malaria deaths, it's on par (or higher, depending on the year) with deaths from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

I really dislike sites that make you click through slide shows to get to the point, but this one from Bob Vila does have some fun items to peruse. It's a post titled 15 Old House Features we were Wrong to Abandon. It's a fun read for a Friday, and does show how much more thought we used to put into houses before we became obsessed with square footage.

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Friday photo: 5/2/14: Where am I?

Another day, another flawed demographics study