PLEASE STOP BUILDING HOUSES EXACTLY WHERE WILDFIRES START

BUILT WELL, A city should provide a bulwark against disaster. Fundamentally, all cities are fortresses.

Or at least they should be. If a city is a fortress, where’s the wall? The edges of North American cities today aren’t edge-like at all. Most of them, especially in the West, ooze outward in a gradient, urban to suburban to exurban to rural to wild. Some megacities cycle through suburban and exurban forms without ever manifesting anything that looks like a downtown, much less a high street.