CityLab Daily: How Did Duke Doom Durham’s Light Rail?

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What We’re Following

Blue Devils in the details: After two decades, a rail project linking Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, came to a screeching halt. The reason? Duke University wouldn’t sign a cooperative agreement for the $2.7 billion project, and refused further meetings with the region’s transportation authority.

Duke’s decision angered local leaders who desperately want light rail. “If, in fact, this was insurmountable, we should not have been going forward and spending tens of millions of dollars in public funding,” said one Durham County official. “It really raises the question of what was the intent all along. Was there no real commitment in the first place?” Today on CityLab: How Did Duke Doom Durham’s Light Rail?

—Andrew Small

More on CityLab

Bauhaus in Tel Aviv

Little did the Nazis know when they shuttered the Bauhaus that it would inspire the signature style of Tel Aviv.

As European Jews fled Nazism, the city needed housing, fast and cheap, that appealed to the people arriving in the “first modern Jewish city.” The answer was the International Style of architecture, which drew on the core tenets of the Bauhaus. Over 4,000 such buildings were erected in the 1930s and ’40s, but it would be decades before Tel Aviv mythologized its Bauhaus past and established it as part of the city’s brand.

For CityLab’s Building Bauhaus series, visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger explains how Tel Aviv’s buildings came to be monuments to its history of sanctuary and self-isolation: Unpacking Tel Aviv’s White City

What We’re Reading

How cities preserve their “viewing corridors” (The Guardian)

Secretary Chao’s hands-off approach to emerging transportation tech (Curbed)

Kamala Harris announces a bill to expand the U.S. Digital Service for state and local governments (Wired)

Is Hudson Yards the neighborhood New York deserves? (New York Times)

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