• NPR travel personality talks ‘walkable cities’

    The show covers urbanism trends like why America is experiencing a dramatic rise in pedestrian deaths, while Europe is not.
    Rick Steves may be the best-known travel personality in the US, with an extensive multimedia business attached to his name—including books, travel guides, television, and radio. The NPR program Travel with Rick Steves has been on the air for nearly two decades, focusing mostly on Europe—where...Read more

  • Storytelling, urban design, and saving a city

    How places from Seligman, Arizona, to Buffalo, New York, have become aware of their history and charms—including planning and design—to turn urban failure into success.
    John Paget, a filmmaker from Seattle who lived and worked in Buffalo for many years, makes the case for how the simple act of storytelling can bring a city back to life. In a TED talk called “How to keep your hometown from becoming a ghost town,” Paget reports that cities are destroyed by many...Read more

  • A funky mix of transit-oriented development

    When you go to Charlotte, North Carolina, you are likely to wind up in the South End, a funky mix of new buildings and converted warehouse and industrial sites a mile or two south of Uptown, the city’s central business district. The area is noted for its ongoing building boom, but also forms a...Read more

  • Our cities need social infrastructure also

    People don’t live by water pipes, sewers, street lights, and thoroughfares alone. Social infrastructure is what transforms cities from collections of buildings and roads to communities worth caring about.
    Note: This article first appeared on Strong Towns .​ My first summer of living in Waco, Texas, I sat up late one night journaling. It had been about 10 months since leaving Brooklyn. What did I miss, exactly, I wondered to myself as I leaned my head back against my pillow. A few predictable answers...Read more