Pietro's Essays and Commentaries

My primary focus is urban development, especially housing and the design of dense cities as good places to live.
However, in the process of studying cities I have also been gaining insight into more general social issues. I hope the following essays are useful and fun reading in a time of increasingly vicious and partisan public discourse.

I wrote the above introduction during the Bush era. In present terms (2009) this page is a sort of blog, though it predates that form and I only post rarely! I have moved political reference documents to a separate page so that I include more of them.

Cities and environmentalism (04/08/08)
A Leftist position advocating wealth-generation (01/13/07)
Policy Ideas for a Democratic Congress (11/10/06)
Civics Lessons (12/29/05)
CIA propaganda comic book and critical analysis (12/26/05)
Intolerance Threatens America (08/17/04)
Required Civil Service (12/27/03)
Using Permanent War to Revoke Rights (12/27/03)
Proposed New American Flag (09/14/01)
Problems which states solve (08/25/00)
Marriage as a Civil Right (01/02/00)

Graduation Speech, (5/22/94)
For the College of Environmental Design, which includes Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City and Regional Planning. Focuses on the promise of the Americans with Disabilities Act as a remarkable but quintissentially American experiment in the finest tradition of extending rights.
Proposition 13 analysis (03/11/94)
Written for Public Economics course taught by John Landis. A detailed look at what needs to be changed in this tax law to restore both equity and the long-term financial health of California.
Comparative Air Pollution Policies (01/20/93)
This is a paper I wrote for Manuel Castells while I was in the Masters program in City and Regional Planning.