News & Events
A skyward vision
A local architect has crafted a bold new vision for 45 acres of prime San Mateo real estate that will challenge the city’s 55-feet building height limit by a wide stretch.
Dan Ionescu, who lives and works in San Mateo, proposes to one day replace the Hillsdale Shopping Center with 1,000 housing units, a 900-room hotel, 500,000 square feet of office space, 2 million square feet of retail and commercial space with parking for 10,000 cars and 12 acres of park space...
An Alternative Underground Track for High Speed Rail?
Imagine a park over 40 miles long, stretching from San Francisco to San Jose filled with restaurants, cafes, and eco-friendly housing and businesses. Families could rent bikes and make a day excursion, returning on the train.
This is not a fantasy, rather, a plan proposed by Ben Toy, President of the San Mateo United Homeowners Association, and Dan Ionescu, a Peninsula-based architect, whose work focuses on sustainable urban development...
The identity of a city
About half of the world’s population currently lives in cities or towns. Why? And why are so many more eager to join them? Can economic opportunities alone account for this migration? Or are there other motivations at play?
A few preliminary considerations are in good order before attempting to answer these questions:
1. The fulfillment of any human being’s potential is limited, in principle, only by (life)time and (ever more scarcely) material resources.
2. Most human beings are instinctively driven to maximize their potential, either as a requirement for survival (freedom from) or out of ambition (freedom to), and the concentration of functions in and around cities or towns still provides a substantial advantage for individual fulfillment over rural settlements.
3. Different urban environments offer varying degrees of opportunity for individual fulfillment, but most surpass rural environments in opportunities on offer, because the quantitative advantage (density) provides substantial support for the qualitative advantage (choice).