• Saving the culture of one of China’s oldest settlements

    A master plan for Shanghai's oldest district prioritizes preservation while allowing for strategic development.
    China is rapidly losing its historic, human-scale urban fabric. Demolition of historic areas is common, and new development is typically done in block-size increments, sliced apart by wide arterial roads. Old Town is where Shanghai began as a fishing village in the 13th Century, and it retains some...Read more

  • How a Florida beach town changed how we live

    12 Ways that Seaside revolutionized how we think about cities and towns.
    Note: Jay Walljasper, champion of walkable communities and former editor of Utne Magazine, died a few months ago . Jay wrote a number of articles published for Public Square over the years, including this one on Seaside, Florida. A town built from scratch in the 1980s ignited a revolution in how we...Read more

  • Good news, the era of sprawl is over

    That problem we’ve been having with inefficient, spread-out, unsustainable, automobile-dependent development patterns is solved at last.
    On Friday, the National Association of Sprawl Tasks and Initiatives (NASTI) met to discuss how to get closer parking spots to their meetings, only to discover that parking lots fronting power centers, commercial strip corridors, and the group's offices nationwide had magically disappeared—along...Read more

  • The urban dimensions of climate change: Lessons for a New Urbanism

    Reining in sprawl is still the most important first step in transitioning to a more benign kind of settlement, and more responsible planning. Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is only one of many benefits—but it is a significant one.
    There is an intriguing paradox within the inventories of greenhouse gas emissions per capita—the emissions that each of us generates through our daily activities of moving, interacting, and consuming resources. Those who live in an average settlement in the United States consume and emit on average...Read more