• A street ballet to aspire to, from the Dutch

    The Netherlands is one of the happiest places on Earth . This video by Active Towns founder John Simmerman gives a reason why. On the last day of a visit, Simmerman recorded a typical morning commute in Delft, a historic city of just over 100,000 people. For US residents, imagining going to work in...Read more

  • Ten features of walkable communities

    The following features of walkable communities were presented this week by Wade Walker, a transportation engineer with Kittelson & Associates. This is a great list, although not definitive; other lists of 10 could be made. Here's Walker’s list, with my comments. Small block size. The average...Read more

  • Why pre-historic mobility will never get old

    The drawing was inspired when I was channel surfing and stopped at a history channel that showed reptilian animals crawling and then walking. For 5,000 years, we have been making cities that relied on human energy, animal power, and no mechanical mobility. These lessons are available to all of us...Read more

  • Urban exodus and new urban reunion

    In the early 1980s, a young architect, Dhiru Thadani, saw a lecture by another young architect, Andres Duany, who was designing a new town called Seaside with his wife and partner, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Duany explained how the elements of cities decanted, one at a time, to the suburbs in the...Read more