The Michigan Central Station is a singular ruin in a city that epitomizes decline. It is ironic that in the Motor City the most eloquent symbol of the ebbing of a technological system, and the culture in which it thrived, has far less to do with cars than with what cars displaced.

The essays collected by Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa in Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities look at the diffusion of technologies in different historical, institutional, social, and cultural settings and the transforming impact of large-scale technologies over time.

In his elegant and thought-provoking Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast, John Rennie Short revisits and updates Jean Gottmann’s conception of the supermetropolitan urban region.

Since the destruction in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina last August/September, I have pondered the strained links among cities, technologies, and catastrophes. In this I am probably like millions of other people. The only difference is that a few years ago I wrote a history of New Orleans’s relationship with the Mississippi. So, when Katrina [...]

Oxymorons are paradoxes gone bad. We learn simple causal relations with great facility. As Clark Glymour has observed, even infants know this: to get the pacifier, tug on the blanket it lies on. But we have a harder time getting our minds around the meaning of very small probabilities over very long time scales, likely [...]