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Alex Marshall

Alex Marshall

Columnist

A journalist and consultant, Alex Marshall is the author of The Surprising Design of Market Economies; Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities; and How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken. He writes a regular urban affairs/infrastructure column for Governing and has contributed to Bloomberg Voice, Metropolis, The New York Times, Architecture, The Boston Globe, The New York Daily News, The Washington Post and many other publications.

Marshall has taught about infrastructure at the New Jersey School of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. From 2002 to 2018 Marshall was a Senior Fellow at the Regional Plan Association in New York City. In 1999-2000, he was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He has consulted with Arup, Sidewalk Labs and other organizations. He holds a master's degree from Columbia University’s journalism school and a bachelor's in Political Economy and Spanish from Carnegie Mellon University. A native of Norfolk, Va., he was a staff writer and columnist for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk from 1989 to 1999.

He can be reached at amcities@gmail.com or on Twitter at @Amcities.

Brick-and-mortar stores are surviving, but what they’re selling is changing.
Publicly owned internet networks are giving some rural regions an advantage over even the techiest big cities.
Efforts to bring back passenger trains are happening all over. We need them.
The tunnels he wants to build under Los Angeles would profoundly affect the life of the city.
For one, what’s the objective -- to improve service, save money or both?
Increasingly, people are selling everything from everywhere. It’s given hope to communities once shut out of the global economy.
Are we doing enough for the people left behind in cities?
Our cities and states have the most to lose and gain from how we deal with it. What we really need to do is to enforce the laws we already have.
How a city built on water handled its infrastructure gives America much to think about.
They don’t cost much.