• The resilience built in

    What Porchfest teaches us about place.
    There’s a lot to love about Porchfest, the increasingly popular, oversized block party experience where porches become performance stages and lawns become venues. The music, the neighboring, the strange but welcome sense of permission to wander across a stranger’s lawn and linger on their grass,...Read more

  • Video tells the tale of impressive Belgian New Urbanism

    A town extension of seaside resort took a week to design, but it has been 25 years in the making.
    A team of new urbanists went to Belgium in 1998 to design a small new neighborhood, an extension of a seaside resort town, at the invitation of the mayor. A weeklong charrette produced an impressive town plan and renderings, along with an implementation kit—including design guidelines, a platting...Read more

  • Six urban center types transforming cities

    A new book by the eminent urbanist Jonathan Barnett will make you more optimistic about US cities and their growth.
    Jonathan Barnett has been at the forefront of urban planning for an astonishingly long time. From 1967 to 1971, Barnett was director of urban design for New York City’s Department of City Planning under reform Mayor John Lindsay. Over the last half-century, he has held long tenures as a professor...Read more

  • Thirteen characteristics of walkable neighborhoods

    A checklist of physical qualities of walkable neighborhoods was enumerated by Dhiru Thadani in The Language of Towns and Cities.
    A few weeks ago, real estate professional Mike Hathorne posted 13 physical characteristics of neighborhoods on LinkedIn, which he paraphrased from Dhiru Thadani’s 2010 tome, The Language of Towns and Cities: A Visual Dictionary . I sent the list to Thadani, who endorsed the wording and sent images...Read more