• Ten environmental benefits of walkable places

    This is third in a series of articles on the advantages of building human-scale cities and towns.
    “The recovery of spawl to vibrant places is literally our generation’s greatest challenge,” says architect Steve Mouzon . There are many benefits to building walkable places, backed up by research and common sense. A research report called Cities Alive by Arup, a multinational engineering and...Read more

  • Climate goals translate to work for new urbanists

    A recent report by Brookings sums up the challenge for US climate goals: It can’t be done without moving much more decisively to compact, mixed-use, walkable development. To quote from their report: “Simply put, the United States cannot reach its GHG reduction targets if our urban areas continue to...Read more

  • Blocks versus barracks: On the missing chapter

    A discussion around the book, Architecture & the City, prompts a critique of prominent eco-urbanism developments on the basis that they fail to create good urbanism.
    Toward the end of John Ellis’s review of my recent book, Architecture & the City: Selected Essays , he suggested: A potential missing chapter in this otherwise splendid book could include examples of sustainable urbanism from other parts of the world. Taking clues from work such as Harrison...Read more

  • We need both EVs and the 15-minute city

    Without improvements in the way we plan and build communities, electric vehicles will never deliver on their sustainability promise.
    Farhad Manjoo's opinion piece for today’s New York Times notes the limits of electric vehicles (EVs). Despite a big market move to EVs and hybrids, the American fleet has barely improved its efficiency in the last 10 years—mostly because people are buying bigger cars. The move to bigger cars is...Read more