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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.

We travel much quicker than we used to and are still pushing to increase the speed. But that’s not necessarily a good thing.
It seems America has forgotten that air travel is supposed to serve the public.
Private companies are paying the city $500 million to transform old pay phones into high-speed Internet hotspots. Is it a plan other cities can copy?
It’s time to rethink how we manage transit systems.
It’s easy for officials to forget that the price of public goods should be kept low in order to increase use and promote economic growth.
Years ago, the now-convicted politician seemed honest and straightforward.
Are Jane Jacobs’ lively streets disappearing for good?
Should government facilitate Americans’ changing relationship with cars?
The United States lags behind other countries when it comes to sophisticated infrastructure in part because it lacks the workers to build or maintain it.
Politicians sometimes promise to eliminate problems like smoking or traffic deaths, but what does that mean for policy?