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 [...]