For decades, many city leaders have thought the only way to end blight was to tear down the eyesores and start fresh. Mobile, Alabama had another idea.

Ed Morrison—author of Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership—shares how city leaders can grow their economies by fostering collaboration on a local level, including how to find existing assets in your community, how to encourage existing organizations to focus on a shared goal, and how to incrementally pursue that goal.

Scott Ford, former Director of Community Investment for South Bend, Indiana, knows a thing or two about how to turn around a declining place’s fortunes. He shares some key insights with us.

Paul Fast—Principal Architect at HCMA, a Canadian architecture and design firm—discusses its More Awesome Now project and how you can revive neglected alleyways in your own neighborhood, including how to assess the needs of the neighborhood, how to measure the success of the project, and how to consider all members of the community in its design.

In most of North America, we’ve created a world where the poor and rich alike have to pay a very expensive ante—owning a car—just to participate in society. Will autonomous vehicles bring about a fairer world, or exacerbate these inequalities?

Every time it seems like our housing crisis is going to bring everything crashing down, banks inject a dose of antigravity. How long can it go on?

Does development in a struggling part of town mean displacing the people who already live there? Derek Avery doesn’t think so—and he’s walking his talk as an incremental developer who works hard to lift up the communities he works in. And here, he answers your questions.

If the city fixes the street outside of your home and increases the value of your real estate, you should have to pay the city back some of that windfall…right?

When we take the steps that make our communities more financially resilient, we often make them healthier too. Just ask Dan Burden of Blue Zones: an organization that works with cities and towns across the country to help people lead healthier lives.

Many of the cities we live in are under intense economic, social, and environmental stress. But how do we start to change the local planning status quo when the public doesn’t trust planners or policy experts?

An interview with Steve Nygren, developer of Serenbe, Georgia, about how Serenbe is unlike conventional suburbia, and why Nygren thinks it holds lessons for how all of our communities could achieve a better way of life at a lower cost.

Liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. So why do so many of them agree that we need more infrastructure spending—even if it might make our town weaker?