• Fighting loneliness through community design

    As the problem of loneliness grows, urbanists and planners may successfully design for social interaction in three broad ways.
    America is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness, according to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. One in two adults report experiencing loneliness, he explains, and the numbers are highest among young adults (79 percent of those aged 18-24 report feeling lonely). Loneliness has profound implications...Read more

  • Community fosters social life through civic design

    A new town in Alabama is a model for how community planning and institutions can connect people.
    Healthy communities need formal and informal civic sites and institutions that promote social interaction for humans to thrive, argues Seth Kaplan in his recently published book Fragile Neighborhoods . Physical design that includes town centers and gathering spaces helps meet that need...Read more

  • Designing gathering spaces in a car-oriented city

    A new urbanist development named after a literary hometown focuses on the arts and much-needed public space.
    Newport News, Virginia, is a city of 186,000 people where downtown is hard to find. The area that Google identifies as the heart of Newport News is an office/industrial park. The traditional center at the city's south end, on the James River waterfront, primarily consists of parking lots and single...Read more

  • Why we need to design community into neighborhoods

    The author of Fragile Neighborhoods urges urban planners to take on a vital domestic challenge: Help restore the social function of neighborhoods.
    Improving the physical design of the built environment is not enough, argues author Seth Kaplan. He contends that healthy communities need formal and informal institutions that promote social interaction for humans to thrive. “We can’t just build with a vision of the built environment; we need a...Read more