• The benefits of bike trails

    Bicycling infrastructure is a suburban retrofit strategy in Northwest Arkansas.
    In an effort to make sprawling Northwest Arkansas more livable, 163 miles of bicycle paths and trails have been built in recent years—including the 37-mile Razorback Greenway that links all of the region’s significant cities. Studies show that bicycling in general provided $137 million in health...Read more

  • Affordability is not a zero-sum game

    A new report by Todd Litman offers a vision for optimal urban growth for affordability and livability—laying down a challenge to Wendell Cox, smart growth critic and author of a widely cited report.
    In a new report , researcher Todd Litman critiques the widely-cited report by Wendell Cox and his firm Demographia, the International Housing Affordability Survey (IHAS) , which was published in January for the 14th time. IHAS gives Cox a platform to argue against housing regulations and what he...Read more

  • 65 reasons why urbanism works

    Studies that quantify how urban places affect human, economic, and environmental wellness are essential to building the political will for change.
    “Reconciliation is making peace with reality, our ideals, and the gap in between,” via Her Honour, Janice C. Filmon, Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba. Much of our work at PlaceMakers is about redirecting the trajectory of where we are headed with the targets needed to ensure the wellness of our...Read more

  • New research resource for urbanists

    Please contribute to our effort and let us know about research and topics that are missing.
    In the hard-slogging world of the practicing architect, planner, or developer, academic research might seem remote, or even irrelevant. While not all academic research on urbanism is (or even should be) immediately actionable and directed at practitioners, I’ve always thought that there needs to be...Read more