Our drive continues through the area once called “the ugliest place in Maryland.” When you look around, though, you can find the building blocks for an urban transformation in these suburbs.
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Let’s take a drive down Rockville Pike, a major thoroughfare near DC. What kinds of development patterns will we find as we pass through each ring of suburbia?
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What do we find when we look behind the "New Urbanist" façade of this master-planned development?
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Globally beloved animator Hayao Miyazaki has a secret he’s been hiding in plain sight for years: he’s one of the best urban designers and thinkers of our time.
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Good urbanism can save bad architecture any day—if your goal is to create a place worth being and maintaining and belonging to.
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Urbanists may debate the merits of Top-Down Beautiful urbanism vs. Top-Down Pragmatic urbanism. But there’s a third, better way — one that emanates from the bottom up.
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It’s time to shift the power in our cities to bottom-up systems that address urgent needs rather than protect the status quo.
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Commentators have speculated that density has been toxic during the coronavirus crisis. But Joe Minicozzi of Urban3 did what he does best—he ran the numbers—and found a different story. This is why data should prevail during a pandemic.
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Some will use the spread of coronavirus as a knock against dense cities. But walkable, bikeable cities are also more adaptable — and will fare better in the long-run.
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The world’s cities have played host to a lot of human misery over the ages. But they’re also a vehicle for the very best that humanity is capable of. That isn’t going to change.
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Compact development isn’t just for big cities. Some of the best walkable urbanism in the world is in the smallest towns. And embracing this is the key to enjoying the best of both worlds: urban and rural.
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This Valentine’s Day, let’s talk about what makes a city a great place to fall in love… and what makes a city lovable in and of itself. Often, these are the same things.
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Making places strong isn’t all about big, “sexy”, top-down projects. And the fact that we call these things “sexy” might be a part of the problem.
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It’s an uncomfortable truth: doing the right thing for our communities usually means doing the hard thing. Or at least the less easy thing. What does this mean not only for the people who design our cities and towns but for those of us who live there?
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The values often labeled “urbanism” are really about living the kind of locally-centered life that’s easier on your wallet, the environment, and your health—and that makes our communities more prosperous and resilient as well. But do you need to move downtown to be an urbanist? Absolutely not.
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Most cities’ zoning and development regulations obsess over things that are easy to measure, like building height and density, at the expense of the things that actually determine whether we’re building quality places.
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In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Alissa Walker, urbanism editor at Curbed, about how you don’t have to be a professional urban designer to have an impact on the built environment. Documenting your own observations can capture the attention of your peers and inspire much-needed improvements to the livability of your city.
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We hear this term a lot, but it’s never clearly defined.
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The city's loss decades ago was the suburb's gain. Today's city gain is coming at the expense of the suburbs.
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The Dow Jones Industrial may be down, but the Dow of Cities is rising.
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