Upon completion of my Fellowship year, I returned to The Boston Globe and fashioned a beat about planning and development, mostly in Massachusetts and New England but it also took me around the country to witness both sprawl and urbanism. The beat, which evolved into covering transportation and the Big Dig, plus everything I learned during my Loeb year led me to write This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). I then left the Globe and did a year stint in the state Office of Commonwealth Development led by Doug Foy.
In the summer of 2006 I joined the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, under the leadership of a new president, Gregory K. Ingram. Over the last four years I’ve been proud to be part of the Institute’s engagement on issues such as smart growth, land use and climate change, and city planning. I organize an annual journalists’ conference in partnership with the GSD and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. My second book, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City, was published by Random House in 2009. The book has been optioned by HBO to be a movie starring James Gandolfini as Robert Moses.
The biggest impact of the Loeb Fellowship has been to keep me interested and curious about new ideas and to continue to communicate and foster dialogue about design and city building, as cities take their rightful place as the greenest form of human settlement to which we can all aspire.
