• Street plans are ‘the foundation of city planning’

    The history of master street plans, why they enable the richness and diversity of incremental development, and how they are being applied today—reported on CNU's On the Park Bench.
    The greatest plans of the New World were all street plans—Savannah, Washington DC, Manhattan, and Philadelphia. They had no codes for a long time, and yet they endure today as great cities. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., the great landscape architect, put it simply: "The street plan [is] the foundation...Read more

  • ‘Grand Boulevards’ promoted for affordable housing on commercial strips

    Two studies show the enormous potential for housing fronting underutilized commercial strip arterials.
    HDR and Peter Calthorpe are promoting the idea of Grand Boulevards, commercial arterials redeveloped with dense, mixed-use housing and bus rapid transit (BRT), as a solution to the nation’s housing crisis. I wrote about this idea in 2024 after a Calthorpe presentation at CNU 32 in Cincinnati. Since...Read more

  • Alleys and (re)urbanization: Repairing broken urban form

    The body of literature is growing, but alleyways remain underresearched and underutilized assets for American reurbanization. Regardless, these latent spaces already complete many of our favorite cities.
    While only comprising an exceedingly small footprint in urban areas, different flavors of alleyways add livelihood and functionality to cities across the world. Yokochos in Tokyo, wynds and closes in Edinburgh, minor streets/mews in Philadelphia, laneways in Vancouver and Melbourne, Montreal’s...Read more

  • Coolest ADU I’ve come across

    This structural brick masonry ADU demonstrates the feasibility of this technique, and it is gorgeous.
    This lofted, one-bedroom accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in Bentonville, Arkansas, is built of true triple-wythe brick construction. According to Alli Thurmond Quinlan of Range Co., the designer, “The design of the building was organized around a salvaged historic white oak arched door, recovered...Read more