About

This site is created and maintained by Mike Ernst, a designer and urban planner interested in cities, community development, and social change. I’m a fan of Mike Davis, and named this site after one of his books. I graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, earning a Master of City Planning degree through the College of Environmental Design. In the summer of 2007, I was the Piero N. Patri Fellow in Urban Design at SPUR.

I live in New York, New York, though I’m originally from Cincinnati, Ohio and lived for several years in San Francisco, California. I previously attended Miami University of Ohio, graduating with a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Western College. There I researched macro-economic policies and urban development in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa.

This website was originally prepared for a trip I took in the Fall 2006 with the International Honors Program. Through the IHP Trustees Fellowship for the ‘Cities in the 21st Century’ program, I traveled to Argentina, China and India with twenty-five undergraduate students and three professors. The focus on the semester-long trip was on sustainable development and social change in world cities. Over the course of four months, I traveled to New York City, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Shanghai, and Bangalore. I recently returned to teach with IHP, this time in Detroit, Sao Paulo, Curitiba, Cape Town and Hanoi.