• How art shaped decades of New Urbanism

    The movement has been heavily influenced by art, as Volume 2 of The Art of the New Urbanism makes clear.
    The Art of the New Urbanism Volume 2 (2010-2025) is now available and is even more impressive than Volume 1 , which was published in 2025. There are well over 600 individual images, compared with about 350 in the first volume. Some are groups of images brought in after a single image in the series...Read more

  • The Sisyphus Medal

    Buff Chace, a downtown developer in Providence, Rhode Island, was the first recipient of the Sisyphus Implementation Medal.
    Dhiru Thadani has designed the Sisyphus Implementation Medal for CNU. The first recipient was Buff Chace, who received the award at CNU 33 in Providence in 2025, but there was no time to design the medal itself before its presentation. Developer Buff Chace “was responsible over the last 35 years...Read more

  • 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