Calendar of Events

Tracks of Change or Mixed Signals: HSR and the Promise of the Railway Station RegenerationRailway station urban revitalization projects are among the many economic development promises of HSR supporters.  This lecture reviews the history of efforts to bring HSR to California, limns the political arguments made for against HSR with a focus on urban form, and reviews the extant literature on HSR, before presenting several cases of large-scale, HSR related urban redevelopment projects in Europe and Asia and observations about the associated restructuring of post-industrial inner cities.BIOGRAPHYTim Higgins joins cityLAB as its Associate Director and Researcher in Architecture and Urban Design. He is an architect by training, via Princeton and SCIArc, and an urban designer and community planner by practice. Previous to joining cityLAB he was Associate Director of the Florida Planning and Development Lab. Higgins’ own research interest–concerning the cultural aspects of neighborhood change, planning and design for environmental hazards, urban mobility and transportation, and new forms of spatial data representation– have been funded by various Federal and state agencies and foundations. Each of his research areas is particularly important to Los Angeles, to architecture’s relevance in an urban context, and to cityLAB.