The skinny on healthy neighborhoods
People tend to get more exercise, leading to a powerful salutory effect on health, in neighborhoods with four characteristics.
Place and the displaced
Two very different issues—America’s displaced, and the world’s displaced—both scream for the same response. Our leaders today, unlike 80 years ago, don't understand the relationship between city building, housing for all, and political power.
China chokes on high-density sprawl
Superblocks with high-rise towers surrounded by giant arterial roads are a threat to economic, social, and environmental sustainability. The Asian superpower has a new plan, but can change come in time?
How variety within limits makes great places
The most-loved places are comprised of buildings with an endless variety of details within a limited range of architecture, giving distinct and recognizable character.
Cleaning up a mess in Long Island City
How landscape and urbanism came together to transform Queens Plaza—a hostile place for people on foot or bicycle.
The Build a Better Burb Sprawl Retrofit Council met in Miami to explore opportunities for promoting land-use diversity and transportation choice in the suburbs—with particular focus on the needs of smaller suburbs with less robust markets. A follow–...
Several common assumptions about new urban codes fail to stand up to scrutiny.
The progressive roots of New Urbanism
The movement against urban freeways and slum clearance during the 1960s and 1970s was primarily negative. It opposed modernist projects that threatened existing neighborhoods. With a few exceptions, it did not develop new methods of urban design to...