• New Urbanism’s quiet achievement

    New Urbanism planning principles have been incorporated into comprehensive plans all across Texas, and this has begun to have real impacts on people and places.
    I get a lot of emails from an academic website. I’m not an academic, but occasionally they alert me to interesting papers. A five-year-old thesis paper , by a masters public administration student at Texas State University, is worth exploring today for what the paper says about New Urbanism—and for...Read more

  • To fix suburbs, first define them

    Suburbs may be defined in many ways, and a focus on walkability yields robust data aimed toward making better communities and sustainable regions.
    What’s the best way to define suburbia? The answer depends on who is asking the question and what biases they bring to the table. A Harvard paper by Whitney Airgood-Obrycki and Shannon Rieger describes three methods currently in vogue in academia. Each of the methods yields different definitions...Read more

  • The walkable urban trend keeps going

    A national study shows strong demand for walkable urban development—cities with high rents perform surprisingly well on social equity measures.
    Walkable Urban Places (WalkUPs) continue to outperform other forms of real estate development in the nation’s largest metro areas, according to a new report Foot Traffic Ahead: Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America's Largest Metros • 2019 . The report finds a huge unmet demand for new WalkUPs, the...Read more

  • Health benefits of New Urbanism

    A study examined nine counties across the US and reviewed other research, finding evidence that health is positively impacted by urban design that follows principles of New Urbanism.
    Urban design factors can affect public health in several ways, including physical activity, traffic accident risk, pollution exposure, access to health resources, mental health and affordability, which affects households’ ability to afford other critical goods, such as healthy food and medical care...Read more