His seminal 2005 book, "The High Cost of Free Parking," challenged conventional urban planning norms by highlighting the extensive economic and social costs of free parking.

Safe streets don’t just prevent attacks—they make cities more livable, vibrant and accessible.

For decades, New York’s zoning policies have artificially suppressed housing construction, driving up rents and forcing working- and middle-class residents to compete for an increasingly scarce number of homes.

With vast swaths of the city off-limits to denser developments due to zoning, most rebuilding efforts will reinforce the status quo: sprawling, costly homes that do little to alleviate the housing shortage.

Urban studies is sometimes considered a loosely defined interdisciplinary academic domain, lacking the scientific rigour needed to understand cities. In Canada, urban studies is a little more than 50 years old; a young field, by scientific standards. This begs the question: does urban studies provide an introduction to cities in general for university students? Or is it, instead, the basis of a distinctively Canadian way to understand our cities and urbanity? As director of the Villes Régions Monde (VMR) (Cities Regions World) network, a Québec-based network of urban studies researchers, and as director of the Urban Studies Program at Simon Fraser University,