Half a century ago, Rochester, New York — like so many other cities — built an urban highway that tore at the social fabric, decimated neighborhoods, and made the city increasingly fragile. Today, Rochester is showing cities that there is a better way.
Read MoreThe drive-to version of a walkable main street, surrounded by parking lots, is like a Western movie set made of fake building facades: all hat and no cattle.
Read MoreHow a place makes us feel can’t replace the hard feedback of things that can be measured, but it can be a hint that something is working…or not.
Read MoreNew studies confirm people are willing to pay more to live in walkable neighborhoods. So why don’t we build more of them?
Read MoreIf you want to see more homes built in your city, good urban design isn’t your enemy. And neither are those who insist on it.
Read MoreThe Strong Towns approach to development, as seen in HBO’s “Deadwood.”
Read MoreLarge swaths of our cities were built to reflect a post-World War Two boom that was an economic anomaly. But that party is long over…and, in many ways, wasn’t that great to begin with. So why do we keep romanticizing the past rather than thinking about the cities we need now?
Read MoreProfessional planners are trained to yearn for tighter urban design controls, as if cities without comprehensive, top-down planning would devolve into chaos and disorder. In reality, cities evolve according to mechanisms that allow us to gradually discover optimal urban design across time.
Read MoreMaking 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.
Read MoreWe don’t pay a ton of attention to parking lots in our day-to-day lives—nobody makes postcards of scenic or historic ones—yet parking dominates and shapes the built environment around us more than any other factor. Here’s how to start seeing parking—and the damage it does when we build too much of it.
Read MoreTurns out, the things worth writing home about are the same things that make a place worth calling home. What would it take to develop postcard-worthy places again?
Read MoreWhen you’re moving about in the world, it’s really hard to appreciate just how much land is devoted to accommodating high-speed car travel—or just how much life we could cram into the same piece of land if we didn’t have to.
Read MoreA begrudging trip downtown opened this suburb dweller’s eyes to the delights of a wonderful city street. What similar experience have YOU had that helped you see your place in a new light?
Read MoreSlip lanes are the quintessential embodiment of what happens when speed is the #1 priority and safety becomes secondary. They are incredibly dangerous for pedestrians. Yet states and communities keep building them. Why?
Read MoreThe spooky wisdom of the spookiest night of the year.
Read MoreMany cities think they need to grow to get strong. But adding thousands of additional acres to the city and millions of dollars in infrastructure is usually the last thing a city needs. It’s like trying to lose weight by consuming more pizza and beer.
Read MoreIt’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?
Read MoreThe ecological and economic benefits of having street trees are well-known. As one community is discovering, the process of planting trees comes with benefits all its own.
Read MoreIn an age of near-constant change, should cities be making decisions based on trends, platforms, and even whole industries that may not be around in a few years? Two of the most disruptive industries hold some surprising answers.
Read MoreAn urbanist abroad discovers that Tokyo faces many of the same challenges as U.S. cities — off-street parking, pedestrian safety, utilizing space, etc. — but is addressing them in very different ways.
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