• People enjoying a walkable street

    Preference for walkable communities strong, but young families want a bigger home

    Living in a walkable community correlates to a significantly stronger reported quality of life—and that metric rose during the COVID 19 pandemic, according to a biennial poll on housing and transportation by the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Less favorably for urbanists, two generations...Read more

  • The grid makes a comeback

    An analysis of US street networks since 1940 shows plunging connectivity in the last half of the 20th Century, followed by a sharp reversal of that trend in the new millennium.
    Since 2000, connected street networks have made a comeback, according to a University of Southern California analysis of US streets over the past century. “Since 2000, the grid index and its components have risen back to levels not seen since the mid-20th Century,” notes Geoff Boeing, assistant...Read more

  • Is public architecture dysfunctional?

    A new poll shows that Americans prefer traditional architecture to later modern styles in public buildings, and researchers are finding explanations in neuroscience.
    Americans prefer traditional architecture over modernist architecture by a nearly three to one in a recent national poll . The Harris Poll survey called “Americans’ Preferred Architecture for Federal Buildings,” sponsored by National Civic Art Society Survey, was released this month. The preference...Read more

  • How New Urbanism research could build better cities

    What do we need to know about the success, failure, and future prospects of creating walkable, diverse urbanism?
    In the 1990s and early 2000s there were still prominent people who needed convincing that sprawl was a problem and walkability was fundamental, writes Emily Talen, editor of A Research Agenda for New Urbanism (Elgar Publishing). Now, “urban planners, environmentalists, elected leaders, and citizens...Read more